Vue can only create collections out of objects that are .vob format, which is why wabe suggested saving them out as .vob objects once you've imported them. Hope this helps.

Larger file sizes make ALL programs unstable, it's just a given. Maybe try splitting up the elements in the scene into separate scenes and rendering and compositing them accordinly. I can tell you from experience that large file sizes bogging down a program is definately not unique to Vue. I'm using Autocad 2002 at work and am currently working with a model that is at 63 megs (dwg format) on a 3ghz dual processor system that's brand new, and have bombed out of it on several occasions just trying to rotate the view too quickly. Autocad is an industry standard software (a very expensive one I might add) and I would be highly surprised if Vue (a $500 program) was NOT unstable with a 100mb scene file. Sorry for the rant, just getting a little tired of seeing "vue sucks because of this..." and vue sucks because of that..."

The tilt in the lighthouse is probably caused by the focus setting on the camera, if you really wanted it to not tilt (which would be contrary to how it would look if you were taking a picture with a real camera) you could move the camera farther away from the boat and the lighthouse and increase the focus setting (zoom in on the objects), which would eliminate the tilt. You will have to adjust your atmosphere settings such as the fog and haze effects as they will be much more pronounced. Personally I would leave it as is, but that's just my opinion.

I've used the version (Cinema 4d 6CE) that came on the 3dworld cd (I forget what issue) and I'd have to say that it is a lot more intuitive (at least for me) than 3d studio was, there were some great tutorials that came with the cd too, I wish I had more time to devote to actual modeling but sadly by the time I get home from work (where I do 2d CAD and have started doing 3d modeling) I'm just about too burned out to put in the effort. Overall though Cinema has a lot of really nice features and I would say that based on using the CE version it would be well worth the money.

When you render an animation you have to set up what type of file it's going to render to (.avi, .mov etc...) I'm not sure what you mean by rendering an animation to .pz3 or .vue files. When you render the animation it will create the appropriate video file someplace else, it doesn't reside in the .vue or .pz3 file. I'm not sure if that's what you're asking about. Could you clarify more if I'm wrong.

I see now, it looks like you're right about incorporating textures, I've just never bothered to use that feature in Pro, I've been using both Vue D'Esprit 4 and Vue 4 Pro (Esprit at home and Pro at work) and don't save objects out very often (which is where it prompts you if you want to incorporate materials). Just did some testing and it does seem to incorporate the texture, even if you delete the original source it still holds it as part of vue. Sorry about that, I'm still getting used to some of Pro's new features. I don't have any experience using render cows but it almost seems like it might be two different issues, have you tried the same settings with a different file to verify that it's something in the file or something in the program itself?

Like wabe said, Vue 4 cannot "incorporate" textures, it links them. For example, when you import your poser figure, it links to the location of the textures according to where the Poser program tells Vue to find them. The only textures that are incorporated into a Vue scene file are procedural textures, everything else is linked. Just clarifying. Hope you are able to figure out what the problem is, I've never had this problem with Vue running out of memory except when trying to do an animation that is too big for the hard drive space.

Well, the poser gallery and the vue gallery are very different in terms of who is commenting and looking at the images and I know that the typical work in the poser gallery tends to consist of "naked vicky, and look she's got a sword = lots of viewings = good art". Since this isn't the poser forum I'm not going to go there but I might go check out how this post is going in the poser forum to see how they feel about all this. To respond to stealth1701, yes, it might be a good idea to have a "no postwork" gallery, but Renderosity is not in a position to monitor or control whether somebody uses postwork or not, nor should they be in my opinion. But like Agiel said, if you want a gallery that showcases non postworked Vue images the best place for that is the source, Eon Software's website (which posts exactly what you're looking for, "fantastic images" created using only Vue, with "credit given to those that have the skill to push these packages to their limits". I can't speak for the Poser galleries though, maybe you'll find out from them (since you posted this there as well) where there might be a site that has non postworked poser images.

I usually try to avoid postwork, but there are some instances where it is simply not possible to realize the vision of what you have in your head with only the program, The most postwork I've ever had to do in an image was smudging the obvious edges in the spheres used to create the volcanic cloud in my "destruction of paradise" image, and before that I had tried for months to come up with a way to do it that didn't involve postwork. But other than the smudging and some brightness/contrast adjustment the rest of the image is entirely 3d, so I'd have to disagree with putting it in the 2d gallery. There was a similar discussion just recently about using poser figures in Vue scenes as well and this sounds like the same thing. My feeling is that it's up to the artist to determine where it should be posted, you can't really draw a line in the sand and say "this goes here...this goes there". Oh, incidentally, most of the Vue hot 20 images have no post work in them at all so I'm not sure where you're coming from on that one.

I started with Vue 3 a few years ago and have also tried Bryce 5 (which I quickly disliked because of the not quite intuitive interface and the difficulties I had in creating new textures (compared with Vue anyway)). Right now I work with both Vue D'Esprit 4 and Vue 4 Pro, So far I love the added features of Vue 4 Pro, but you'll have to weigh it yourself as Vue 4 Pro is more expensive. Personally if I had neither and had to pick one I would choose Pro over D'Esprit and do feel that the added features are worth it, but only if you don't have either version right now. Just my opinion.

Debby - Another screenshot

Debby- This screenshot might help as well.

I use dual monitors with Vue 4 Pro, that shouldn't be the issue, have you tried downloading the latest updates, that solved a lot of my crashing problems with the material editor and other misc editor functions. I've also heard from others that the latest beta (4.53) seems to be fixing a few crashing problems others were having. Hope this helps.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/gallery.ez?ByArtist=Yes&Artist=nanotyrannus

While Gebe is correct that you CAN get DEM's into Vue using the handbook, what the handbook doesn't tell you is that most DEM files have an edge along the sides that has "null" data, which causes a large wall to come up around the DEM you are importing. What I have done (see the link below for some finished examples of my method) is to use a third party program called 3dem to seamlessly combine multipart DEM's and then crop it down to the area I need (the area must be constrained to a roughly 4 quad by 4 quad area as Vue 4 will either not import or give you a flat plain for anything larger.) You then export the cropped area to a USGS DEM format and then import into Vue. Also, you will have to scale the resulting DEM (no matter which method you use) vertically by quite a bit, I have yet to figure out the exact conversion. Hope this helps :)

Does this help at all? My guess would be that your objects are smaller than the camera, as it appears that the height of the camera lens is not to scale with models, so even though the camera is on the ground the objects are below the line of sight of the camera.