Quote - Oh wow that's right on the money! I think I will be purchasing that!! Did you make that just to answer my question?

Yes - It took me about  20 minutes to do this.  Let me know when you get the Stones and Groundcover package and I'll send you the sample scene above.  It requires the Stones and Grouncover package to mainpulate the ground mats.

http://www.cornucopia3d.com/purchase.php?item_id=6732

These are all pretty good ideas.  For me at least, I think the keys are really getting the skin highlights dialed in properly and having a good lighting and atmo setup.

Quote - Interestingly, I've been messing around with an unbiased render plugin for Blender called LuxRender.  It's a bit on the slow side but does produce some very nice renders (from what I've seen lol)

One thing that did strike me is that Blender uses Python to write the exporters - they normally write the "Scene" file to something that can be read by the render engine.  Vue supports python but I don't know how much of the scene geometry could be written out to a file and imported into something else.  Maybe one of our Python guru's (Chipp or Dave) could comment ?

It can certainly be done in VuePython for static objects, but for things like ecosystems and procedural terrains, it would be impossible

That's awesome Chip.  Hell hath no fury like a fellow geek with something to prove - especially when it's grounded in logic.

I guess whatever jawdropping means is in the eye of the beholder.  The one other thing to keep in mind about Vue is that you can also animate the veg which you cannot do in the other high end packages.  I've seen plenty of jaw-dropping animations using Vue as well.

Quote - Totally photo-real?  I'd like to see some posted or linked here.

Here's some that I think fit the category of Photo-real or nearly photo-real from the e-on Pic of the day site.   There are many others, I just selected the first 5 I found

http://www.e-onsoftware.com/showcase/?page=11&Index=3412

http://www.e-onsoftware.com/showcase/?page=11&Index=3388

http://www.e-onsoftware.com/showcase/?page=11&Index=3383

http://www.e-onsoftware.com/showcase/?page=11&Index=3374

http://www.e-onsoftware.com/showcase/?page=11&Index=3346

The Maya renderings are impressive but keep in mind many of the veg elements used in the scenes were effectively alpha maps of photos.  He did a great job of integrating those elements together beautifully.  You can achieve very similar results in Vue with the right lighting and atmosphere setup.  I haven't done any architectural/veg scenes but I've rendered a few nature veg scenes that are quasi photo-real like these:

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1722771

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1822400

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1829504

There are many other artists like Ken Was, Rutra, Sacada, and Czarnay that have done stuff that is totally photo-real.

Great looking clouds.  Why don't you bundle these up and sell it as a cloud pack on C3D or Rendo.

Quote - I've sent the test scene, but I've got an interesting new result. 

Apparently the texture crosstalk is only occurring if I select the option to allow re-posing inside Vue when I import the Poser scene.  I have been leaving that option selected the whole time and didn't think to try to disable it until now.  I don't see anything in the SkinVue user guide indicating that this option should not be selected, so I'm assuming that this is not normal.  But it's definite progress.  If I uncheck the reposing option, the SkinVue modifier works just fine on both characters in the same scene.  I've revalidated this with 4 separate scenes now with the same results each time.

allow re-posing = texture crosstalk
disallow re-posing = all's well

Well that covers it then.  I never have used the re-poser in Vue - way too slow versus just using Poser and re-importing.  I understand now why SkinVue can't distinguish mulitple characters with the re-poser turned on.  It's because the materials in Vue are virtual when using the re-poser and are not tied to a given object physically as they are when importing without the re-poser turned on.  I'll check into this further, but I don't think there is a workaround for this since there is no physical tie between Vue Material objects and Poser when using the re-poser.

Quote -
That's just it.  I seem to have a completely different list of materials for the two objects.  When I click on Mike, there are 52 materials, with his renamed.  But when I click on Vicky, the original list of 84 materials reappears, with the original material names for both Mike and Vicky.  Vue's material list is definitely getting confused somewhere along the line.

Must be something with the poser file you have.  Can you create a zip file of the Poser scene by using the the Poser utitlity "Collect Scene Inventory" by selecting in Poser Scripts -->Utility-->Collect Scene Inventory.  This will gather all of the objects and maps and put them in a single folder.  Then, just zip the folder and stick the zip file on a server somewhere and e-mail the the link to me at dburdick@SkinVue.net.  I will take a look at this - can;t get to it until Sunday since I'll be traveling.

Quote - I'm running Vue7 Complete 7.21-04 Build 39389 at the moment, on Vista 64.  But as I'd noted originally, I got the exact same results in Vue6 Infinite as well.  I've tried a couple of different scenes with M4 and V4 and it doesn't appear to be specific to this scene.

I do have a dual boot setup with the Windows 7 beta.  I guess I could try installing Poser and Vue 7 there to see if it repeats in a different OS config.

Don't bother, it's not OS related - it must be something with your Poser file and what Vue is doing with the file.

Here is an image link showing the steps I took to swap multiple characters in SkinVue:

http://www.skinvue.net/Vue7/SVmultiCharacter.jpg

Quote - I've got a some more information on what is happening when I use a single scene file.  I'm still not exactly sure "why" it's doing what it's doing, but here's the process I'm using.  If it helps, this is also running on a 64-bit Windows Vista installation, with wxPython 2.8 installed.  I get the same results whether or not I select the option to use the Poser materials on import.

1.  Import the scene file, selecting "Group Figures as single meshes"
2.  Rename each 'body' object as noted in prior post

If I look in the material editor, I start out with 84 materials, with separate materials for Mike and Vicky, but each figure has the same material names.  For example:  2_SkinHead, 1_SkinFace, etc. 

A-Okay so far

Quote -
3.  Select Mike, Load SkinVue, click Select and then Swap

At this point if I look in the material editor, if I click on Mike I now have 52 materials, with a Michael4_Body_E, Michael4_Limbs_E, etc with M4's maps, But now all the 2_SkinHead, 1_SkinFace, etc maps for Vicky are gone from Mike's materials list.

This is normal.  The old Poser mats for Mike (e.g. 2_SkinHead) will be exchanged for SkinVue mats (e.g. Michael4_Head_E)

Quote -
But if I click on Vicky, it displays 84 materials again (??), with all of the original 2_SkinHead, 1_SkinFace, etc, listed for both Mike and Vicky.

What do you mean by "for both Mike and Vicky"?  In your step 3 above you indicated that the old Poser materials for Michael 4 were gone -- replaced by SkinVue materials.  The only materials which should be highlighted in the WorldBrowser Material tab for Vicky should be only for Vicky.  There should now only be one 2_SkinHead material for example.

Quote -
4.  Select Vicky, load SkinVue, click Select and then Swap. 

If I look in the material editor now, I still have 52 materials listed when I click on both Mike and Vicky.

If I select Mike, I have Mike_Body_E, etc, with Mike's maps.

If I select Vicky, I have Vicky_Body_E, etc ... with Mike's maps.

This is bizzare.  I just ran exactly the same test with an M4 and V4 character combined in a single Poser file and it worked perfectly - M4 had all of its maps and V4 had all of its maps.  What version of Vue are you using?  I'm on Vue7 Infinite build 39290 with XP64.  I'm wondering if there is something strange about your Poser file that could be causing some type of cross-talk.

Quote - I had imported with the "Group Figures as single meshes" option and it automatically named the two characters and 3 clothing objects as "body".  But I had changed the names for each figure specifically to Michael, Vicky, Shirt, Pants and Shortsbefore applying skinvue, with the results shown. 

I'll try splitting them off into separate files and pull them up separately to see what happens.  Thanks.

Make sure when get ready ready to swap you re-select the individual target object you want to swap materials for.  So for example start with your Re-named Michael character first, select it, then swap.  Then select your Vicky character and then swap.  If you select the global group containing the entire set of sub-figures, you'll get the result of a shared set of materials as shown in your result.  In some cases, this may be desireable ifyou want to apply a common set materials across a group of characters (provided they share the same UV mapping and material types).  In your case, you need to swap each character individually.

The re-poser in Vue is one of those ideas which sounds great in principle, but in reality, it's a very bad idea because the Poser api is still a single threaded architecture, meaning that it can only operate in the calling thread of another application.  This is why it is unbearably slow, to the point of being unuseable.  There's absolutely nothing E-on can do about this until the Poser guys make the Api fully muti-threaded, or better yet, build a simple standalone re-posing engine that can operate in it's own address space.  The best way to work around this problem is to simply re-pose in Poser and then go back into Vue where it will automatically sense the change and re-import the model.  This is far faster than using the Vue re-poser.