I can talk a little about this as I use both Vue (at home) and World Construction Set (at work). They really have two different purposes, so for n-light to answer his/her question he'll have to think about what he needs. I'm a GIS person and I use World Construction Set for visualizations of potential outcomes of forest management. It's renderer is not near as nice as Vue's. It does however populate and render large areas with 2D images of trees or whatever you want very quickly. Integration with GIS is not near as good in WCS - nor is it intended to be -(although you can pull in DEMS and other GIS layers in WCS to develop your image) as it is in the company's other product which was built to be fully integrated with GIS - Visual Nature Studio - which is very costly (between $1500 - $2000/seat I think). You can animate in all three programs. You can use 3d images generated in other programs (trees, etc.) for foreground detail in both WCS and VNS. WCS v6 doesn't come with any 3d trees or vegetation - I'm not sure about VNS. For images leaning more towards art, I personally would choose Vue. For images where I need exact, real world placement of items on the terrain I would use WCS or VNS. It will be interesting to see just how much capability Vue 5 Infinite has in this regard.

I haven't been around here in a while - I see things haven't changed much!! Not picking on anybody in this thread or in the old OT forum. Sometimes I enjoy reading forums for entertainment, sometimes for information... Maybe the moderation job just got to be too big in the OT forum, or some of the conversations too politically sensitive for this age of "Homeland Security" - I hadn't looked in on it in a year or so.

Hey - that was nothing - try going ot CGtalk or, I'm sure, some of the other high-end sites mentioned in that thread if you want to see some real Poser bashing. Personally, I think a lot of people using CG are going for roughly the same fantasy character look, so whether they've modelled their models themselves or used a Daz model an awful lot of the characters and scenes end up looking the same. It's no different than someone who's trying to paint something in the style of Rembrandt/dutch artists or whatever. It's very difficult and time-consuming to model a human figure as was mentioned in that thread, and most people do not have the time to do it, unless they're being paid for it. And often even if they're being paid for it, whoever's paying probably won't mind if they use a Daz or Zygote model because the cost for the total job will be much less.

Too bad we can't edit posts (had to say it) - on my last one the P5 render is on the left, DS on the right.

I've found that any object file that's set up to tile the textures causes results similar to what you have above (don't know if that's what's going on with your particular model or not). I have the problem with props/figures such as RDNA's microcosm and skydome - but only those figures set to tile textures. I've reported this as a bug, although it may just be something that's not fully implemented in the material portion of the program yet. A lot of the material/surfaces stuff doesn't seem to be fully there in this version.

I'm going to go with SamTherapy and say Edith Piaf.

Displacement maps are the same as bump maps (inverted greyscale image), as far as I know - at least that's what I've been using in Poser5. Hope I've been right (it's definitely possible I'm wrong) it causes things to displace in P5 anyway, but it's easy to go overboard and cause huge holes and distortions in the object geometry. I've tried using one in Daz Studio for one of Kromekat's textures, but didn't see any effect - I had it set at 14% so I may need to up that value.

I'd like a Daz studio category in the gallery as well, if that's possible. I agree the two forums and posts about the two programs should remain seperate. Thanks

Silo's very new and trying to break into the market - while I haven't tried it myself, the price is very good. I use Cinema 4d now, which works really well for me. I used to use Wings3d and still keep my version up-to-date. Wings is very easy to use and many of the pros (I'm definitely not one!) use it.

Take heart, Veritas. It doesn't appear that many of us use Lightwave (at least it didn't when I answered the poll yesterday). They would have been better off asking what other 3d apps we all use rather than focusing on one.

Thanks for this! I'm sure this will be really helpful.

HaiGan - 3 LovePyrs - 2 miyu - 1 It was very hard to pick just 3!

Thanks, Dave-So, I'll take a look! If I make a transmap to shorten it up, it'll do for what I need.