I've definitely had those discontinuities in the render on the odd occasion that I remember (I had the disontinuities, but I didn't get any big black squares - it was as though it just skipped over a part of the scene and joined the top of the render to the bottom without the middle) - its only happened a couple of times.

Was never sure what the problem was, though I wondered if it was somehow related to  the resume render info getting confused with the actual size of the render. 

Example - Sometimes I've had a partial render saved in 4:3 and say 1600x1200 as an example, but after reloading to resume rendering, it sometimes seems to reset itself to 1024x768 in size. This can have some odd effects with the resume render info (as its trying to load 1600x1200 resume render info onto what it thinks is a 1024x768 sized render).

Thats my guess as to whats happened (in my case), so not sure if it sheds any light on your problem or not.

Congrats Chris.

It was very nice of you to send that fireproof armour over for us heretics to wear in the forum, but surely the spikes were meant to be on the outside of the armour and not on the inside?!?

I have all of them installed.

I've got b5.01 - I prefer how its importers work  with regards to surfaces and material zones and its the most stable of all of them. Rarely gets used now though.

b5.5 for 99% of the scene creation - and its got ds importing which is handy for those poser figure things - also quite stable and some of the really annoying b5 bugs are gone.

B6.1 for some rendering - having the menu bar glued (and made green) across the top of the interface makes bryce feel ugly for me (and sucks about 20 or so pixels off the working area), so I prefer working in the others. I only have  a hyperthreaded PC, so multicore support doesn't do a lot to help my render times.

There's  a "weird" category. Thats where I throw the odd "strange" bits. Cool pic as well :)

Quote - I still love Bryce though. It opened up the doors to the whole world of 3D and I'll always be fond of it.

Yup. me too :)

The duplicate texture issue (and their removal) was one I ran into when I did my Siege series. Getting rid of the dupicates can save a lot of space on some scenes, less on others (depending on how the thing was put together). I'm guessing though that the only duplicate textures you have are the horse skins. (I liked somone's comment about it being a combination of 3d and photo lol)

I seem to remember reading that Vue has (allegedly) some advanced texture caching or some such thing to allow it to work better with large texture maps, but from my experience it seems worse than bryce at coping with the large textures that you get with poser.

See MikeJ's post above for the quote I would have put here but didn't want to waste the bandwidth.

Yeah, that amused me when I read that the first time as well.... as visions of numerous threads at other websites and the flow on effects those threads create here spring to mind.

So first you decorate the site (the site graphics you did a few years ago) and now you're (on your way to) running it?!? Nice work and congrats! Now just make sure you don't go and get a job that stops you from coming here lol

Thanks. Most of those were done in bryce as Vue is only a recent addition to my armoury. Amarri-Tath was done at the default Broadcast mode.

As far as I'm aware, the rigging problem you found is essentially because the thing you're rendering (the rigging line) is a fair bit smaller/thinner than a pixel of the final image, so as the rigging line crosses pixels in your rendered image it can sort of appear/disappear depending on how much of it falls within each pixel that it runs through (thats my understanding of it anyway).If only a bit of rigging lies in a pixel, then it'll not show up, if there's a fair bit of rigging line in the pixel, then it'll appear.

I use one of two ways to go about the problem - first is to just render bigger (in effect making the rigging mesh bigger with respect to the pixel size in the final image) and then shrink the rendered image down to the size you want. This can be really inefficient for time.

Other way is just to up the AA settings and re-render the troublesome area of the image until you get the result you want and then paste that back into the main render in a paint program. Now I haven't done any "rigging" renders in Vue, but in Bryce you'd just raise the ray's per pixel up to about 16 or 36 and that'd take care of the problem from my experience. In vue I think this translates to playing with the object anti-aliasing slider's max setting to those sorts of numbers and raising the quality slider for the OAA to 90+ % and see how that goes for rerendering only the troublesome area. 

I'm still largely at the trial and error stage in Vue as far as render settings go, so I  don't really have an innate feel yet for what is appropriate for these sorts of things. I'd recomend have a good read at Peggy's pdf tutorial that people mention in this thread ->

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2714774

 and going from there - its what I did. As long as the final render is under a week, I'm happy :)

Thanks for that link - the whole lighting tut series looks handy and can't wait for him to finish the last couple of parts (though by the sounds of it, those might be in the book).

If you up the AA settings, the dotted lines should/might go away - I used to get this same dooted line effect in Bryce with ropework/rigging, and that was the solution.

Quote - Since Bryce is all maps I am sure that is what he used.  So If you had some stock photos of the four elements you could map them onto the sphere or into on an alpha plane inside the sphere. 

I'm pretty sure Bryce has had procedural texture abilities and volumetric materials for quite a few years now. Clay's fire which was used in one of the spheres in the picture of discussion is essentially the brycian standard against which all other bryce fire materials are measured (and its free). 

Vue's function editor is still on my to-do/learn list, but it looks handy, so I would expect you could make simlar mats in that. Vue has a lot more lighting options though.

The only time I ever tried to roll back a patch resulted in having to reinstall Vue (can't remember if that was V5i or V6i though).  I was thinking of just calling updates that roll back fixes as undates.

On the memory size stuff,  I've had 1.3GB bryce5 files that have opened up to the full 2GB of ram usage (32bit XP) fine and then happily render - bryce5 doesn't need much ram to render in, though I've never had anything above a 5000x5000 texture come through intact in anything. Vue definitely doesn't like large amounts of image based textures as far as I can tell - my most problematic scenes have that (mainly due to poser imports) as their common feature.

Quote -
These same bugs get cured & then return updates later :(

Undates anyone ? :D

dlk30341  - what you say about that rotation thing might explain why I thought I was loosing my mind a few nights ago - I could've sworn I had rotated this building... and then whenever I looked back, it was back unrotated, so I would rotate it again... and then it was unrotated 5 mins later..... at the time I thought it was sleep deprivation kicking in, but by the sounds of it, may have just been Vue lol (that was the only time that's happened to me though)

Oh well, lots of saving, lots of restarting.

And now for a quote from an IM I received a while back that had me chuckling for quite some time  -> "one good thing about Vue is that after you crash it, it restores and reloads quickly!"

I'm curently on winXP 32bit with 2GB of ram (no recent security patches have been installed) and am now having the "wandering texture" issue where objects sometimes get oddly retextured with some other texture in the scene. Haven't had that one for a long time, but after putting on that 6.5 update it seems to be back. Having a few issues modifying textures when resources are below 40% and Vue crashing when you hit the OK button (which I don't remember occuring anywhere near as often as when I was on one of the pre 6.5 patches - the one before they started playing with the radiosity). Also for some bizarre reason, sometimes things I hadn't selected in the hierarchy editor suddenly become selected after moving things I had selected in the hierarchy, meaning the second time you move what you thought you had selected, you move a whole lot more than just what you thought..... I think.... 

Also the eco systems vanish from the preview window whenever I save the file 0_o (not a serious issue, just odd and something else I hadn't noticed before). And then there's the working window screen flickering to blank all the time (the objects are still there, and the screen comes back if you select something in the hierarchy editor - again ont a major issue, just an annoyance).

Not sure if all of these issues are related to the last couple of scenes (mainly poser imports with largish numbers (maybe 10) of fairly decent sized image textures - not in my gallery here) or a more general problem, but hope it goes away (gets fixed) either way.