Angela, As far as the problems I was experiencing go, they weren't of e-ons making, but they have been very helpful in sorting them out. I've never found them anything but helpful and courteous. Poser poses a different question though... I wouldn't hesitate to recommend Vue and Mover 4 on their own merits, whether Poser's worth the current asking price... Sorry if that's not too helpful, try reading the Poser forum.

I don't think e-on can have carried all the fixes in 4.12 over to the RenderCow engine. I can now, finally, render the rain tutorial OK as a single frame, but the rain doesn't appear if I animate the scene and use my render farm. The fact that somebody gets a "flashing" effect is interesting - sounds as if some machines on the network are redering correctly, others not. Machine specific issue? Or maybe different versions of RenderCow on different machines?

I've never tried before - I render P4 animations in Vue - but I just checked it out. I get the same errors on my system. I do quite a lot of animating and compositing, using several different programs, mainly with DivX 5 codec, and no problems, so I guess it's a P4 problem.

Attached Link: http://www.thugsatbay.com/

OK, .dem export filter for Terragen is part of the "firmament" set of plug-ins from: http://www.mclusky.co.uk/firmament/ The cool thing with that is that .dems are imported into Vue as terrains, rather than meshes, and so can have all the related functions and filters applied to them.

No need for you to say sorry, I knew that! Just me having a silly joke:) I'm the one who should say sorry.

Can't check until I go to work on Monday - not going to screw up my own machines! But I've met similar problems on users setups twice recently - both times the IDE cable thing, so...

Checked the link, can't see anything wrong with her face, she does seem to turn into wireframe from the waist down though. Maybe you should consider giving her some clothes?

Yep! Export as .lwo, I believe there's a plug-in somewhere for .dem too.

If you've actually lost data/fried your OS then this sounds much more like a hardware issue than anything to do with XP. Check your IDE cable and make sure it's not a 40 wire. The most recent motherboards' controllers expect an 80 wire. If you re-used a 40 out of an older machine, not only can you expect sporadic corruption, but using repair utilities will only make things worse. John

Can't add much to what anybody has said above. Great to see somebody applying some of the great, artisanal, American traditions of painting to Digital Age images, beautiful. I'm not an American BTW. John

Oops, forgot to mention... ...I think you need to turn on Use Inverse Kinematics, for both arms, otherwise it will distort the hell out of the collars!

Wanted to do something similar to example 1 myself - actually a figure pushing a trolley, basically the same problem though, just with a walk path - tediously long winded way I got round it as follows: 1 Apply walk to figure. 2 Open keyframe editor and delete all keyframes for collarbones, shoulders and forearms. 3 Go to frame 1 and place the hands as required. 4 Select left hand, choose Edit>Copy. 5 Cycle through all keyframes, using Step Forward, then Edit>Paste. 6 Repeat steps 4 and 5 with the right hand. Boring and repetitive, but it works!

Thanks for the comments. I wouldn't usually explain what I'm trying to achieve - if I did I'd have failed, yes? - but seeing as I'm asking for advice here... The (accidentally arrived at) background made me think of vague childhood memories of places. So I wanted to achieve a contrast between the unrealistic past backdrop and a realistic, slightly threatening, foreground future, with the girl standing on the boundary between the two. Sorry if that sounds a bit pretentious:) Anyway, on my home monitor it looked great. Tried it on a TFT panel at work and the foreground looks horrendous, especially that damn rock. Must turn up the brightness on my monitor! There's certainly way to much ambient light too. I'm working on it. John

Sorry Rattler, but if it was ready, that wouldn't be an error would it? If I checked and found I'd forgotten to set the timer and it wasn't cooked at all - now that would be an error. Come to think of it though, considering I'm a vegetarian... you could be right!