It is a good product, I have an older version of Texture Maker, but when I migrated to Vista x64 it kept crashing. Never got it stable, so, I looked for something else and found Genetica, which was compatible.

What is interesting about this basic Editor, the Viewer will allow you to render separately the texture maps along with the final texture. These could be very useful by themselves for other projects.

I like this editor better than some of the others I have, will have to save a bit though. 

Creating a displacement map for velvet is time consuming, but not impossible.  The closest example is the Spiky displacement material.  

You would have to create a map with much smaller spikes much closer together, that resemble fibers on the order of one eighth the size of human hair.  That would create a tremendous amount of geometry to render.  However, with a good 2D Graphic Editor, and lots of patience, you could draw the map.

The Botanica Plant and Tree editor is not as complex as xFrog, Carrara or some of the other high end Plant Editors. However, you can get very creative; by altering other plant species and creating your own from preexisting. 

Otherwise, there is a lot of content on Cornucopia for preexisting solid-growth plants and trees. Just make sure you buy plant species that are the e-On variety of Solid-Growth based rather than the one piece Object which cannot be altered with the Editor.

You will need some type of 2D Graphic Editor to paint some of the new maps you may want to create.

There are a lot of hard core Vue users on this Forum, so you can gets lots of advice, if you decide to create your own.

As wabe suggests you can get the free PLE and see if the editor is what you want, or go onto a third party app that will do what you need. 

The Botanica Module License is $39 for Esprit.  
http://www.e-onsoftware.com/buy/?page=2 

Attached Link: Create Rain with 3D Max

I am having the same problem, and had to uninstall NVidia drivers back to 101.4. It would seem that the Poser SDK and the ProEngine.eon are not compatible with 158.

You should file an issue with tech support to NVidia and e-On about the difficulties. Tech has informed me they are hard at work and trying to resolve the problems. 

I have tried all of the Vista drivers and the closest to the old WinXP drivers seem to work the best for now. Unfortunately, the 158 drivers work will all of my other 3D software with a good 30% boost in performance. So hope this issue gets sorted out soon as I want to go back to the 158 drivers.

Others on the e-On forum tell me they are not having any problems as long as they do not use OpenGL, so this is the main source of the problem for us. Vue uses OpenGL extensively for the newer functions, rendering, and memory threading, which is the current source of problems. 

I recently saw a tech Newsletter, where NVidia is hiring more than a half dozen new Software Engineers at its offices, so they are not taking these issues lightly. I guess we are stuck in the middle, because I have installed Vue in Vista x64, x86, and WinXPsp2 and still have most of the same problems under each OS with the NVidia drivers.

The 9600 is outdated and will not fit the newer AGP or SLI card slots, which have different wattages different bus speeds that can cause unnecessary wait states and hick-ups when using older cards.

Motherboards are usually a matter of personal preference, as some like Gigabyte, others Asus, and still others Intel. Intel based boards are the most supported, but Microsoft is trying to change that with the partnership of AMD and ATI. Soon AMD will put a chipset on ATI video cards so that they will be compatible with DX10.  

NewEgg, TigerDirct are good sources of boards and cards, or combo's. If you choose a motherboard, you want a 24 Pin ACPI Power supply, a board that can handle the extra wattage for a video card, which is usually 300 watts per card or more. Do not under power a motherboard with duel CPUs and Video Cards. A Duo Core 2.6 or better is nice, but very expensive, a Pentium D 3 gig is good. The quad cores are not yet supported in a way that Vue can take full advantage. Yes look for a board that can handle 4 gigs of memory or more. The more memory you can install the bigger the scenes and the quicker the render. Get DDRII memory with low latency PC5300 or better. Above all else make sure the board is fully compatible with the x64 platform, and especially if you are to use Vista.

Remember the CPUs do the processing not the video card. The video card simply takes the rendering engines info and posts to the screen. A couple of SATA 300 gig drives are nice.

Currently if you are to run a video card with a little muscle, you will have to have an ATI x1650 or X1950, and for Nvidia any cards above 7800 should work well with XP, Vista, and Infinite, 8800 is better.

That should get you started. 

Attached Link: Vue Software Comparison Chart

I agree, and if you are to add a graphics card you will want one that supports DX10 for the future, 8800 or higher and perhaps the fastest SLI you can get. 

Driver support and 64 bit app support is scarce.  I run Vista x64, and most utilities are 32 bit and do not support the x64 platform.   However, x64 will also run most x86 or 32 bit graphic software.  So with the correct hardware setup, completely based on the Vista x64 platform, everything compatible, you can make the OS perform. 

Do your research before you buy and make sure everything is supportive of Vista x64.  Even if you do not like Vista x64, you can always fall back to WinXp x64 or any of the x86 platforms with good supportive hardware.

With Vista Ultimate, and Virtual PC you can run other OS's within the main OS, which gives you another option.

Yo could also try turning the ground plane into a mirror.

Thanks agiel, I missed that Tut!

Attached Link: Tech Support Thread for Esprit Patch

The e-on software support technician responded:
Hi Jan,

The latest update should install fine on the retail version.   Is the updated version crashing?  Unable to open?  What are the problems you are having?

Best regards.
Lee Randall

I have sent them an update of the problems encountered when trying to install the patch.  If interested follow the shorcut to the thread above. 

I would create the top part, flip unside down, add to the bottom part and then blend into the third terrain.  A lot easier than trying to carve an undercut.  

The other method is to create a canyon terrain and then turn it on its side.