I absolutely fail to understand what all the secrecy is about. Seems paranoia has reached pathological levels at e-on...

Dale, dlk, you are making me curious - I didn't see it, and am wondering whether VI will be of any interest to me and worth the wait. Could you name, say, three or four truly stunning features that would justify the $530,- outlay that e-on charges us poor Europeans for the upgrade from v5e? When I first got v4e I considered v4pro but didn't find anything worthwhile enough in it to spend the extra money. The additional options mainly seemed to be aimed at handling very large scenes and enhancing workflow. I've never been able to find consistent differences in the quality of finished renders from v4e or v4pro. So why burden my pc with heavyweight software and use up resources on lots of options I will probably never use, I thought. Will it be the same with VI? There were 3 things in v4pro that I really liked: the plant editor, the ability to fine-tune lighting, and reflection mapping. I don't need the plant editor anymore as I got XFrog now, which IMHO produces better looking vegetation than Vue any day of the week. The lighting gizmo is now made available by e-on (bless them, only $52,-)as a download add-on to v5e - I might well get that and then just forget about e-on until they start selling v6 and VI becomes available as a downloadable sale item... (I was really excited, btw, to find the reflection mapping option explained in the v5e manual - unfortunately, that was a typo, so I'll have to make do without that...)

I'm very happy with e-on's products, but have my doubts about their customer care. I already let them know I think it's absurd you can download a fully functional Vue demo, but cannot actually buy the program as a download - so much for their 'online' store. Worse, they don't even send it by regular mail: you have to spend a ridiculously large sum simply to pay for a courier! It also seems unfair that they don't have single currency pricing, and yet also ignore exchange rates. At the present exchange rate, as a European I payed more than $170,- rather than the advertised $129 for my upgrade. Add 25 euros for shipment and 30 euros VAT and in fact in Europe you pay nearly $250 dollars for your (late buyer) upgrade - that's almost twice the amount they advertise with! But you won't know that until just before completing the order - it feels like being cheated.

I never had crash-problems with Vue 4.2, and have them constantly with 5. I'm on a P4 1.6 Ghz, 1Gig ram, fx5950 ultra 256mb video card, and over 180 gig free harddisk space. Vue 5 definitely seems to have a problem handling large models. I am working on a very large architectural model, which I imported into V5 at an earlier stage (appr. 800,000 polys). It worked fine. After additional work on it, it went over 1mln polys. Vue 5 would still import it, but anyy subsequent action resulted in a crash ('out of memory' error). I've now split the model up into six separate parts; if I import these one after the other and then group them in Vue, everything works fine, though somewhat sluggish. If I put the group on a separate layer and hide it, there's no problem at all.

"Really an old processor"... was afraid so - I'll just need to do something about that, I suppose. Meanwhile I followed up on some suggestions above and redid my trial render using GI instead of GR. Also, I used user settings, switched off all unnecessary options, and chose tile render. All else was left as before. The result (lower half of above image) finished in 1h54m! Less than a third of the time the GR render took. And IMHO it looks in fact BETTER than that - though it is somewhat darker, it is also distinctly less grainy.

Hi Holli, I had a try with global radiosity using a model I'm working on - to see the effect, but also to test render times. I used a simple standard atmosphere, no volumetrics etc., and rendered in Final at 1024x768. I was very pleased with the result: GR eliminates that faded flatness you would often get with shadowed area's in Vue 4. The building now looks more solid and has far more nuance in dark area`s. But render time was pretty long: at 6h 43m GR took 129 times longer than a non GR render, which completed in 5 minutes. I expect that a definitive GR render including more objects, additional lights, volumetric atmosphere and a higher quality output setting will take at least 24 hours to finish, if not much longer. On the other hand, I'm not sure if the complexity of the scenes/objects makes much difference. My very first GR try after getting V5 was with a standard atmosphere and just a few plain cubes, and yet the estimated render time was also about 7 hours (I didn't finish that one). It depends on your PC configuration as well, of course. Mine is a P4 1.6 Ghz, with 1gb ram, 260 gb harddisk, and a nvidia fx5950 ultra 256mb video card. Pretty average, I guess, but well beyond the minimum requirements and even the recommended configuration mentioned on the e-on product site. Though it is great e-on implemented radiosity in Vue 5, in the end I think it is an option for pro's, not really suited for use on your average home computer. It is a bit frustrating that Vue 5 offers so many options to get really high quality renders, but if you apply them all (and of course that is what we all want) you'll have to wait a week to see the result. Not very practical any way if you have only one PC... Maybe we`ll get a more efficient implementation of these options in future versions?? I'm also interested to hear experiences and advice from others.

Felix, I always export from SU to Vue in Wavefront obj.-format. Works like a charm every time - if it's a large model containing many groups/components, in Vue 5 you can even weld the whole thing into a single object and still access all materials. 3ds works fine too, but has limitations with regard to the size of the model, and doesn't allow smoothing of curved faces.

Jinx, You need to add an alpha-map - it's in the folder you downloaded from 3droad (and if you can't find it there, you can always make one yourself using any photoediting software). This is what is looks like in Vue 5; it can be done in 4 as well. Good luck, Martin

Meanwhile e-on has replied to my query, and alas: it IS an error in the manual and helpfiles. Sloppy (and disappointing)!

dlk, that's not the problem; according to the manual there should be a second check-box below that one, which would open another function editor next to the one you've already got there (I've got THAT one, too...)

I think you're right, and I fear it is a typo - there is no force use of reflection map'in the render options...

Hi Agiel, Thanks for the quick response. I didn't find anything on this either at e-on support or on their forums. If it's a typo, it's a REALLY big one, as you can see from this extract from the Vue d'esprit 5 help-files (same text as in the manual). I'll contact e-on about this and post their reply here.

If they are going to make it easier, which I agree they could, I would prefer it if you could size the image and the shape using the same units; the confusion in the present version results from the use of different units of size within the same picture.

Dave, I dont really see what your problem is. It took me less than ten minutes to get this right - merely a matter of adapting the picture scale, and using picture offset to fit the picture on the cube more precisely (units are pixels, so you need to enter fairly large values, 100s etc., to see the effect).

Hi Polax, Thats an interesting effect! However, once you set the mapping to object rather than world, this problem disappears - at least, it does with the test cubes I used - it doesnt in my model. And anyway, this effect doesnt explain why material 2 doesnt show up in the lower regions of my model at least. Saving the material under a different name for every seperate object might be worth a try, but is a bit daunting as the model is comprosed of over 100 components.