my vote goes to number 20. And i agree a little too much violence around this time. Walther

hi, from my opinion the problem has to do, that you look directly (frontal) onto a flat surface. That always looks a little "unreal" and flat. I think you have to go back into the original model and try to bevel this element or even try to make it round. Or, if not possible, try to separate this element from the rest of the gate and map your leaves (or something else) onto this element so that you dont see the flatness anymore. :-) Walther

Phil, no problem to send you these screenshots - maybe you give me your e-mail address via a direct message. The only problem is, that i am out of office minimum tomorrow. And i have my Mac at the office, so you have to wait a little. Anyway, i am shure that we can find a solution - if there is one. By the way, how big is that poser file you try to import? That would be interesting to know. Walther

Hi Phil, still problems - i am sorry to hear that. My first idea as well was that something is wrong with the textures in the Poser originals. I as well do have problems that Vue likes to crash when i try to load a file and Vue can't find a texture file. By the way, that seems to be a problem in the Mac and in the windows version. Have you tried out smaller Poser files as well? Because Scott's second idea that it simply could be a memory problem makes sense as well. I think you should try out to import small poser files (a horse or something like this) first to find out wether your Vue will import any Poser file or wether your problem is a general one. If you are interested i can send you my system profile (in screenshots??) so that you can compare it with yours. By the way, i never needed the e-on fix from Steve, the import worked on my system from the very first moment on. AND I DEFINETLY INSTALLED POSER UNDER OS X!!! If you need more help, let me know. Walther

i think this will be difficult for e-on. To be fast, a lot of renderers get immediately rid of all polygons with normals pointing away from the camera. That decreases the number of polygons the renderer has to deal with drasticaly. So probably there is not really a solution for this problem exept of flipping the normals (if possible) in another program. I'm curious to see wether e-on will be able to sort out this problem. Speed against acurassy. :)) Walther

ok ok, By the way, your german is not bad as well! ;) Lets see. how would it be to try a german distribution. I have very good experiences witrh innotech (www.innotech-soft.com). Very helpful, very competent. They do have vue, with updates as well but i haven't seen a cross-update on their web site. Maybe you try to call them, ask for Lars Bogh (greetings from me - Walther Beck). Maybe they can help. :)) Walther

Sascha, wie waers denn mal mit einem deutschen Vertrieb zu sprechen. Ich hab sehr gute Erfahrungen mit Innotech (http://www.innotech-soft.com/) gemacht (natuerlich anrufen!), sehr hilfsbereit, sehr kompetent. Die haben Vue im Programm, auch eine Update-Moeglichkeit aber zumindest auf der Internet-Seite kein Cross-Upgrade. Eventuell den Lars Bogh verlangen und einen Gruss von mir sagen (Walther Beck). Vielleicht hilfts ja. Gruesse, Walther

Yes, thats why i ask before simply giving it away. No problem! Walther

Ahh, i forgot something. For all who can handle Cinema 4D files (by the way, importing Cinema files is something for the wishlist), here a collection of nice materials. Not all of them are working (some are using very specific Cinema features), but there are some really nice things there. http://www.maxon.net/deepshade/shader/shadr_inx.html Walther

still haven't found my little Mac program i am looking for. But tomight i had some ideas which maybe could be interesting. Computer Arts (british magazine) from time to time offers on the added CD full products. On CD of issue 67 it was Poser 3 On CD of issue 58 Amapi 4.15 On CD of issue 63 EyeCandy 3.1 So this are not the newest versions of the packages, but they are free. AND THEY ARE THERE FOR BOTH WORLDS - PC AND MAC! And i think you can order old issues from the magazine, so there is a chance to get these. www.computerarts.co.uk :-)) Walther

Scott, does they? Not with me. The thing i did was to install Vue on one of our Windows machines in the office. I open the files there and save them back under the same name. After that "washing" i can open everything on my Mac as well. The only thing is, that with functions, you are losing the preview icons, so i have to save them again on my Mac. I dont know how legal this is (to install a second version), but i dont see any other way for the moment. If you dont have access to a windows machine, maybe i can send you some things - Varians functions for example. But perhaps Varian (or the other owners) could let me know wether i'm allowed do this. :-)) Walther

What a nice idea to collect this urls! But anything for my Mac (not this discussion again)?? Especially some years ago i tested a little shareware program which was able to let you paint fractals in 3D space (voxels). I think that would be perfect to produce foam etc. BUT I FORGOT THE NAME - AND DELETED IT. Anybody any idea??? :-)) Walther

Hi Guitta, thanks for your quick answer. I don't think we should start a PC vs Mac discussion now. Everything is said a thousand times (and the Mac is still...)! In fact what i meant was, that i receive an error message (and nothing else) when i try to load a scene, a material, a function, an object or whatever which is saved under Vue 3.1 (or earlier). Ii still think that this is very odd. Because first e-on should be easily able to implement an import filter for their own file formats. Second, that vue hadn't existed on the Mac before version 4 is a lirtle weak. 3D studio does not exist on a Mac at all and Vue is able to import this format without any problem! ;-)) Walther

After working now for a while with Vue on the Mac (great programme!!!) i think there are some little "nice to have" things. Isn't it strange, that vue can import a bunch of formats but is not able to import its own 3.1 format(s)? This cuts us Mac users off from (i would think) 95% ot the stuff which is available on the Internet!!! Not nice. Second, it would be nice to have a feature "collect for output" which collects all the texture files etc which are used i a scene, object or material. I don't know how many materials, object etc i have downloaded so far where some textures are missing. Third, i would like to have a feature which copies/pastes attributes from one element to another. If you have to change 30-40 lights, located in different groups you know what i'm talking about. Last, it would be nice if you qould be able to "sit" on a light source while locating it in a scene. That means, that you could swap between the view from the camera and the view from the light source quickly. That would be nice. All of these things - i think - should be easily implementable because all the elements are available in the software anyway. Hope these are not too personal wishes so that it makes sense to discuss this in a (wonderfull) forum like this. Thanks again Guitta for your efforts! Walther

my vote: 03 And i have no idea who did that! Walther