You rock, my friend.  I will try them this weekend (probably Sun. afternoon) and let you know how it goes.  Thanks a million.

Fletch

thanks GPF,

I did try 'drag and dropping' my materials from old to new VUE projects w/ multiple sessions of VUE.

It's DECEIVING, because at first you think it's working like a charm... then I find that YOU CAN'T SAVE YOUR FILE ANY MORE... nice.  THATS a problem... and I can duplicate it over and over... I tried 3 or 4 diff. times.  It worked for me the first couple of times... then nothing.

another thing is... I have almost never exited out of VUE in the traditional way of the file>exit pulldown... it has crashed on my 99% of the times I've ever used it.  As a long-time user of ACAD, VIZ, FormZ, Microstation, Sketchup, and many more... I can say that VUE is the only program that does this to me.

hmm...

I could have sworn I tried to do that to my sun, but maybe I didn't!  Can't see it in the viewports.... beautiful... sounds like a potential post to e-on tech support.

The camera thing is not so simple, it's animated very precisely for an architectural fly-thru and it's 17 seconds long, I don't want to have to go thru setting it up again.  It's odd that on their site I see you can export the camera to VIZ using a plugin, but can't copy a camera between two scenes... they definitely need to fix this.

I have a theory that maybe if I "save-as" and delete everything in the scene except for the camera and sun, then export the entire scene as a .3ds, maybe I could import it into another scene that way... I just had that thought when I woke up this a.m. and since my computer is still rendering my animation I will have to see later.

 

Thanks Jim

 

Shadeus, care to share the atmosphere and render settings you are using?  Radiosity takes forever.  What size image are you doing?

cool, I saw that option, but wasn't confident it would export the entire .avi as .jpgs or .bmps, I was afraid it was going to just render one still frame.. thanks a ton!

Yes, I completely agree about rendering 'uncompressed' w/ Vue and Sketchup too, it saves the .avi faster when it's uncompressed. Even if you don't have an post-production program like Premier, you can just zip up the .avi and it will shrink by about 60 percent.

one tiny stupid question before I buy the grass... does it wiggle in the wind like all other solid growth veg?

 

Thanks.

Nick,

In the settings you posted you have 'open GL SOFTWARE' checked... this always caused me to crash out of VUE instantly...   Did you try HARDWARE open GL?  Was it a problem for you?  What are your machine's specs?

 (plus, working w/ ecosystems crashes for me if I add a new species into the mix, or if I do any major change, then try to rotate the camera... boom... bye bye Vue5i... I think that's why I UNCHECK 'apply texture maps to plans' in the option box.)

also, maybe try enabling background draw thread, and increase the slider to be greater than your instant draw?  (I'm not hopeful about this option, but it's worth a shot.)

PROBLEM SOLVED!!!!!

The e-on software support technician responded:

This is probably the automatic scene simplification system, which tries to maintain a given instant frame rate when manipulating the scene.

To disable it: open the general options dialog, go to the display tab, uncheck the "Maintain instant draw frame rate" option, and raise instant draw quality until your model appears normally.

I TRIED IT AND IT WORKED FOR ME... had a little trouble finding the slider to which he referred... but I'm attaching a picture for your assistance.

Very cool, Quest. Another 'advanced' technique... look at the channels and choose the two with the most contrast. in this image's case it was the green and the blue (red had the least). Now, choose Image>Calculations and set it up as shown in the attached. This will create a new channel w/ the emphasized difference, then you can use this as the mask as Quest did. This will get much finer details if you continue using levels or contrast to increase the contrast in your mask alphas and multiply them together. It takes practice and experimentation, but you can mask hairs w/ this technique and isolate complicated details.

Very Cool, thanks, I've downloaded and will try it... I had two theories which will loop endlessly with even less polys and could look realistic... have a go, and let me know, as I have never needed this nor do I plan on needing it... but I was thinking about it when I went to sleep last night. chop your snow and rain cylinder short, turn it on its side, and put your camera INSIDE, then animate it 'rolling' as if your camera was sitting on the axis of the wheel of snow/rain (centerpoint) of the cylinder, then the weather will just roll and roll... the other option I thought would be cool... create two flat planes (circular if you like) apply your rain snow materials to them (so that you don't see the planes anymore, just the rain or snow), then set them up perpendicular to your camera and rotate them on their axis... one on the right and one on the left, like a pair of binoculars. Overlap them and rotate them to roll in toward the center... the one on the left would go clockwise, and the right plane counterclockwise... Then you can put one plane in front of the other and actually get a depth effect... this could be cool... of course the depth effect could be gotten from the cylinder idea as well, just scale up a copy of your first cylinder and spin it at a different speed about the same axis. After writing all this, I decided it's easier just to draw it, sorry! see attached

Javil, good work- must have taken a while to put it together. One thing you didn't mention is that you want to set your mapping to 'flat vertical' for this technique.

Nick, I posted this to e-on's tech support, if they give me a solution (i'm not holding my breath) i'll be sure to post it right away.

I saw somewhere that you put your material (rain or snow)on a cylinder and spin it close-up in front of the camera

I'm having the same problem... hope someone knows why that is... I too remember this working fine before, but now, not good... I just adjust the camera a bit, then wait for the preview. Have you tried resetting all options to default? I haven't tried this yet... on my trial version at home, I can see the model fine, but in V5i full version at work, I just get a black box. sorry I can't be more help.

better yet, just click this http://lemog.free.fr/lemog_v5/index.php?cat=4 great stone textures.. and some skies too. cool