I've just posted a complete rework of my sculpting clouds with images for Vue 9.5 with a video tutorial, two free mats, two free scenes and two free atmospheres.  There was a lot of background noise here so the video is silent...

Vue Cloud Sculpting Tutorial for Vue 9.5

Enjoy :-)

Posted my first Vue 9.5 render to my blog last night -  Blue Yonder - although no new  Vue 9.5 features in use in this yet. 

I had a play with the new fast DoF and I do want to use it in some pictures in anger.

Vue also tries to help you - copies are actually instanced for you (but that only ever comes up as something you need to know about if you're working with Vue's Python).

I always set the little preview render window to only render on click so it doesn't take over at inopertune moments.

Similarly I use Vue on a 32 bit system with 3GB of RAM - knowing how to work within your systems limitations is part of 3D unless your made of money.

I've some scaling objects on my website based on standard sports pitch sizes I made to help a friend who found it hard to work out how big things should be.

It sounds like the pivot point for the object rotating in a big circle is a long way away from the centre of the object.  You can turn on display of pivot points and move them to where you want them.

Vintorix - if your using one of the preset render settings they all have anti-aliasing set. If you want to control them you need to use User Settings.

Maybe your seeing the effect of Interpolation Type on a projected texture map (you can find this in the function editor for a texture on the Projected Texture node) - if you don't want any just set it to None.  That has been discussed here before and I wrote some Python scripts to make switching between the different modes quick when an object has a complex set of materials.  You can find the scripts on my website on the page the page Switch Mapping of Images in Vue Materials.

Hope those help you get the settings you prefer.

I can sympathise - I spent hours at the weekend getting some bought imported models to look good.  Saddly "standard" model formats are not as "standard" or transferable as we might like and materials are the usual suspects when it comes to finding a fix.  There are all sorts of things in textures that may need tweeking for renders that look fine in OpenGL.  The ones causing me problems at the weekend were:

• Reflection maps that need inverting
• Reflections set to 100% on materials that shouldn't be reflective
• Bump maps / Displacement maps that are extreme, inverted or missaligned
• Highlight colours that are either black or white

I ususally start by turning Reflections, Bumps and Displacements down to almost off for the materials then add them in a bit at a time.

Best thing to do is send Procedural an email and get a direct answer.  I had a similar question before buying Indie and I was happy with the response.

Vue 9 - I find Relighting and Downsampling of image maps a big help. 

Are you on 64 Bit or 32 Bit system?

I turn most of the viewport settings to display box with no shadows and turn off other refinements.  It can make it harder to do precision work but it can speed up getting the basic layout done.

I also put each poser model in its own layer and hide the layers when I don't need them.

I used to save each Poser model as a Vob in a blank scene and then reload it but I've not been doing that for awhile now.

Can't really comment on moving to Apple.

I'm really happy with Vue 9 but ultimately its a personal choice - are the new features worth the money for you?  I find the texture resampling a real help working with Poser imports - far too many Poser textures are really far bigger than they need to be unless you're doing close up work.

I'm several miles from a Vue manual so you'll probably find it quicker by searching the pdf for "rain" than waiting for me to get home

There is a rain effect tutorial in the manual - while its quite an old technique with a bit of work it can look quite good.

If you've not already contacted e-on I'd contact them for support.

Not knowing the Vue version (or the Vue enhanced version) was on the way I picked up the Indie version to start learning it for a project I want to do a month ago.

The procedural language it uses is quite simple to learn although some of the demo scenes make it a bit hard to get started with because they do too much out of the box to illustrate doing the simple stuff.

The complexity of the models you can create is really a case of how complex you want to make the procedures.  In principal you could create a procedure that will model a building down to the level of bricks, doors and roof tiles but it would be very complex and in 99.9% of cases pointless to do so.