Another one: using the differen asphalt textures for metal surfaces . . . looking nice, IMO. So, yeah. Download that pack. it's worth it. :D ta, -Sascha.rb

Excellent! This will teach me to reduce my caffeine intake when browsing a user manual blush. ;) ta, -Sascha.rb

Attached Link: Texture Study: Cement and Cloth

NV ruined my week-end--didn't do anything else than trying out the textures and smoking lots of cigarettes. ;) I uploaded an example to renderosity (see attached link). WIP, of course--but I might continue with that theme none the less. ta, -Sascha.rb

Hi dolyl, you'll need this: http://developer.nvidia.com/docs/IO/1176/ATT/msvcr70.dll (copy to windows/system or winnt/system), and this: http://developer.nvidia.com/docs/IO/1176/ATT/dds.8bi (Photoshop Plug-in) for Photoshop support. If you just need to convert them directly into .tga, download this: http://developer.nvidia.com/docs/IO/1176/ATT/DXT_TOOLS_v5.19.zip and use the readdxt.exe. In that final download, you'll also have the Photoshop-Plugin and the .dll needed for it. hope this helps, -Sascha.rb

Well, considering there's a new Beta of Vue 4.xx out . . . 6-12 months at the least seems to be the timeframe. At any rate, e-on has always offered nice trade-in / upgrade packages. Shouldn't really be a problem. ta, -Sascha.rb

LOL displacement maps. :D yes, would be great, but a huge overhaul of the whole rendering engine. Hmmm. Come to think of it, most people would probably applaud a new engine anyway. ;) ta, -Sascha.rb

Hi Guitta, very short, non-technical explanation: different from usual shaders which often aim at (photo-)realistic results, cell shaders produce cartoon-/comic strip-like output, i.e. images with reduced colour palettes, stark outlines and contrasts etc. Imagine creating a Vue scene, and render the image with a cell shader--you'll have a perfect background for a comic book or graphic novel. Hope this helps, -Sascha.rb

Another one: - Interrupt and continue renders, at least when using render to disk. ta, -Sascha.rb

Hmm. Short question: gives render-to-disk the ability to continue an interrupted render? I never tried that setting out. At any rate, that's another feature I'd like to see in Vue5 should it not be available already now . . . adds point to wish list ta, -Sascha.rb

I second the vote for a "complete" plant editor. This doesn't mean we'll need a whole lot of complex options and the like, but just a simple front-end to change - bark (colour, bumpmap, textures) - foliage (colour, density, textures, size) - spread or the like. I know you can change most of those settings by hand, but a plant editor would come in very handy. Then, some more "basic plants" to complete the offer. Those should include - conifers - oak - birch - shrubbery - vines. A shader for grass would be a nice addition, too. Apart from plants, let me reiterate a point from my posting further up the thread: Radiosity, please. Or even full global illumination. ;) Nowadays, other low-cost programs such as trueSpace and Carrera offer either or both. What's more, using a raytracing engine, both can be implemented very easily with Vue. Such an implementation wouldn't be exceptionally fast or easy to set up (lots of parameters to handle, render time would at least double, more likely quadruble), but it would be there for the freaks who want to play around with it or for those renders that simply require the extra quality. ta, -Sascha.rb

Attached Link: http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/rtongfx/

Still OT, but an interesting paper (cf. link) @smallspace, I completely agree with your summary of Vue's viewport "capabilities," with one minor beef: I don't think that the actual computation power of a VGA makes that much of a difference, for Vue's OpenGL implementation. Even on my Ti4400, OpenGL render is very very slow. Compare this to Lightwave 7's OpenGL viewport, which even features real-time motion blur, or trueSpace 6's backed textures support . . . ;) Regarding Vue and render hardware: those friends of mine with ATi boards have a lot less issues with the OpenGL viewport than those with NV hardware. But then, this seems to be highly dependant on one's system configuration to begin with. ATi may have had a bad track record with their drivers, but the situation is improving, somewhat. Nonetheless, NV is still the leader in the field of customer VGA drivers. If you don't game a whole lot at very high resolutions and with Anti-Aliasing and anisotropic filtering enabled, the Ti4600 isn't that much slower than the Radeon9700. ta, -Sascha.rb

Hi auditiy, might be a tad OT, but still--with the latest breed of floating-point precision pixel and vertex shader hardware, even raytracing can be (theoretically) accellerated on a graphics board. RenderMan shaders can be run with multipass rendering, too, provided you write a new backend for the graphics board. Alias|Wavefront among others (Pixar, for example) are already implementing an on-GPU rendering path for their applications. Off-loading render work unto a graphics board can yield fantastic performance gains, and both the Radeon9700 and the soon-to-be-announced Nvidia NV30 will be adequately suited for such work. At any rate, I strongly doubt this will be relevant for Vue users. ;) ta, -Sascha.rb

Hi HellBorn, you won't have to reboot to disable OpenGL viewports in Vue, restarting the application will do the trick. ;) Regarding the OpenGL issue: I had a chat with a dev support guy at NV a couple of months ago about said issue. Apparently, Vue is the only medium-to-major application out there that uses a very specific kind of multithreaded OpenGL output. So unless e-on redid their whole front-end, it was up to NVIDIA to fix the issue (I am told that other manufacturers like ATi don't really have a problem with it). It was more difficult, he said, because some configurations didn't show the issue at all. Apparently, NVIDIA made up for it with the latest build of their drivers, Detonator40. At least I've heard from three independent sources who had previously had troubles with Vue/OpenGL that the viewport corruption is finally gone. Unfortunately, those drivers are a beta release riddled with other bugs, and only available for XP, too . . . ta, -Sascha.rb

Hi Tomsde, are you talking about the latest Detonator40 drivers? because, the problem is still prevalent with the previous drivers set (30.32 or something), for me. ta, -Sascha.rb

Great idea! Wanted to do something cave-ey for some time anyway . . . too bad I'm short on time. :( Oh, what the hell. There's still four weeks to go. :D ta, -Sascha.rb