http://www.geocities.com/l_a_allen/downloads.html I have a few things, and a few of them are made with terrains. Laurie

Try this: Put a slightly yellow light with shadow for your main light above the camera and one or two VERY DIM blue lights with no shadows at camera level. It actually works very well for me. See what you come up with. Just remember to keep the non-shadowing blue lights in the same general area as the main light source, but very dim.

Hey bloodsong...can you see my skidmarks?!! (as I run away into the Vue horizon) LOL Ta ta, Laurie

Aw hell! Gee, I'll miss ya :( I've enjoyed your words of wisdom (and your Poser contributions). I hope nothing bad has happened...will I see you elsewhere? Laurie

Attached Link: http://www.geocities.com/l_a_allen/index.html

Yes, Lyne has some really nice texture maps and I believe she does have one for the polar bear. Doesn't she also have a morph for a polar bear too, to make the Zygote bear look more like a polar bear? (ie, smaller head and ears, longer neck etc.) Regards, Laurie

Hi Mike! You really have to play with that material editor :) When I first started using Vue I avoided it too. I was a former Bryce user and Bryce's material editor really turned me off to procedural textures, believe me! But Vue's is really easy to understand and you can really create some great stuff by mixing materials. I'm not an expert on Vue or anything, but I've been using it for quite awhile, as have a lot of us here in the forum, so if you have any questions, you know where to ask them :) Happy rendering! Laurie

Hello. My name is Laurie....and I'm an addict. Beware the Vue! Side effects may include: sleeplessness, blurred vision, an increase in creativity and euphoria. If you have any of these symptoms, please see Vue d'Esprit immediately! One illness where "falling off the wagon" can be a good thing :) Ta ta, Laurie

On a subtopic: I just wanted to let everyone know that I pulled all my free stuff and art galleries, but only because I was in doubt as to what would be done with them. When all this blows over I may repost them. Anyway, you can still breeze over to Big-i.com and get some of my stuff (which I post only to Big-i I might add, and so would never have been seen on this site anyway) and see my gallery and also on my own website (which is still a work-in-progress). www.geocities.com/l_a_allen/index.html Take care all, Laurie P.S. Bloodsong, it's great to see you still here. Don't know what I'd do without your gems of wisdom ;) And, of course, your swans....LOL.

hehehe I gotta tell you Bloodsong....I put the (LOVELY) swan maps on .1 bump gain. But I did a lot of heavy editing in Photoshop (sorry). I used Lyne's fur painting technique. But it did turn out real nice, no? Ta ta, Laurie

Here's my two cents: Making your own boulders and rocks in Vue is easy. See my pic in the gallery called "Lake Vue". The rocks in the foreground were all made in the terrain editor. All you do is make a terrain, go into the editor (double click the terrain or right click and choose "Edit"), and I like to filter the altitude to about half way before I start making the individual rocks. Then I make some mounds until I think it looks "bumpy" enough, and paint the ground away in between the bumps. After I achieve the look I want, I smooooooth them out and voila! Stones suitable for creeks, rivers, lakes or anywhere you'd care to put them. Hope it helps :) Ta ta, Laurie

Hey Bloodsong, Lookin' pretty good! How about "Nevermore"?

Okay kiddies. I'm gonna clear this up once and for all. Just let me start by saying that I am a graphic artist by trade and have been for almost 8 years. I'm gonna try to make this explanation easy to understand for people who don't quite know how this works...I have to do it nearly every day to customers on the telephone. I work for a magazine and so I'm gonna explain what resolution means to us, who have artwork printed at a professional printer. First off, the whole business of printing on an injet kinda defeats the purpose of going to a printer to have your image printed in the first place (unless of course you don't HAVE an inkjet). I make an image at home 1024x768 pixels. I don't even run it thru Photoshop...I just print it directly to my inkjet (which is 1200x1200 pixels). It prints pretty darn nice. It looks a little pixelated, but all in all pretty decent. Of course the image was only 72 dpi because I didn't change the "pixel resolution" in Photoshop. It's also very large. Why does it look good you say? Because contrary to popular belief, injets do not apply the same technology as a 4 color press. On an injet, the printer sprays all 4 colors on the paper at once. It uses a more scattered pattern than a 4 color press thereby breaking up the edges of the pixels that you would definitely see on a 4 color press print. A print made on a 4 color press is passed separately thru the press for each color and each color dot is placed "on top" of the color before it. Since the pattern is not scattered, the pixels will show at only 72 dpi. Our magazine, for instance, requires that every image in a camera ready piece be AT LEAST 300 dpi. Anything less than that will look "soft" (slightly blurry if you like) and at resolutions less than 200, will look downright awful. Pixelated, grainy, bitmapped, crunchy...however you want to phrase it. You can take a 72 dpi picture and make it 300 dpi in Photoshop and increase the resolution...however, it will make the image fractionally smaller than it was before. Think if it this way...72 dpi as an ink dot the size of a pencil eraser and 300 dpi as an ink dot the size of a pin tip--72 dpi eraser size dots 1 yard apart and 300 dpi pin tip size dots 1 micrometer apart. Finer is better. You can resample the image in Photoshop and increase the pixel resolution without changing the size; however this will give you unsatisfactory results because Photoshop has to "guess" what information to put in the same space where there is no information originally. That's why you can resample in Bilinear, Bicubic or Nearest Neighbor...it will use a different formula for each, none being really satisfactory. The ONLY way to increase the pixel resolution of an image in Photoshop and keep the original integrity is not to resample the image at all, which of course makes the original image much, much smaller. So, to make a long-winded story short, your original image must be rendered at a very high resolution (at least 3000x3000 pixels) to be a decent size when printed at a resolution at 300 dpi (in an inkjet 300 dpi doesn't sound that great and it isn't...on a 4 color press, it's quite sufficient). Pick up any magazine that has decent color printing on decent paper and I'll guarantee that it's printed at at least 240 dpi. I hope this helps...it really isn't easy to understand for folks who don't really need to understand it. I have a hard time explaining it to my customers who just don't understand that we can't use a picture off of their website that is only 72 dpi and only 2 inches by 3 inches in size. How do you make them understand that we can use it, but it will print at less than the size of a postage stamp? All the layman needs to remember is this...when rendering to screen resolutions (72 dpi) render as large as possible if you want a decent sized printed copy because it will get smaller. And Arcady is exactly right...it will take you forever to render at those dimensions in Vue; you will have to do it in stages. A sad but true fact in 3D unfortunately, unless you own an SGI workstation. :) Laurie

Are you gonna post it when it's done? I'd love to see it :) Ta ta, Laurie

I tried it again and it worked this time, thanks :) Laurie