Quote - You can control the orientation with a greyscale map, see attached link.

Or you can use any function that you can construct to do the same thing (the usual caveat of having a version of Vue that has access to the function editor applies).

Thank you -- this is exactly what I was looking for.

Quote - Well put Rutra, and very gently.

Scarcely.

I was going to ignore Rutra's response, as it mixed quite a bit of snide in with no information.

I'm scarcely a clueless newb, as my join date and postings would attest. Vue's implementation of instancing technology (which is what Ecosystems are) is unique, its powerful, but its quite different from other instancing technologies, and the manual, which I have read, is not particularly detailed pace Rutra.

Control of orientation, animated meshes, and much more are mentioned or implied in the manual, but not described in detail; to take but one simple example -- [how] can one use an array of nulls to control an ecosytem? This is common technnique for anyone working with instancing in other applications (HD Instance for Lightwave is my reference point, but there are several others, all working somewhat differently from each other, but very differently from Vue).

I was looking for sources of additional information on controlling what is a very powerful but under-documented tool.

What I got was unncessary snarkiness, and no useful information.

Thanks for that idea . . . but that isn;t close to the Bryce functionality which actually blends textures-- you get beautiful results.

Playing around, I discover that it is possible in this Metaball engine. You can select metaballs as the particle type from a particle emitter, and that has a time component to the shader. Animate the shader, and you;ll get particles of different colors being emitted, and blended.

Its not nearly as beautiful as a Bryce metaball blend, but it does demonstrate that the engine supports this. . . an area open for investigation -- or, dare I say it-- a bit of clarification from Daz

lot of toon style stuff done by proton, the lightwave evangelist and posted at Spinquad. They are LWO (lightwave object) format, which I think Vue does fine

http://www.spinquad.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6186

thanks all.

Its definitely not a clean solution. . . Daz Studio works fine on my PC, its a Mac specific thing. The way I've found that sort of works is to do a search for the content whcih does show up in the initial install (the Faery scene), and then to manually install content to that directory.

thanks for these pieces of advice. Valuable and help.

for whatever reason, the 3Delight renderer has the least render efficient spotlights in the business. . .

thanks for the suggestions . . . they helped with the trouble shooting. The scene was imported from Poser. . . and mysteriously, Vue read all the materials as having %60 ambient . . . I have no idea why.

pain in the butt, because materials are the last place I'd look for a lighting issue. . .

Quote - Save JUST the new parts, JUST for the prupose of getting thier template easily, and make sure they all have new materials.

Oh. This is subtle, and I hadn't thought of it. Thanks-- gold star tip, that!

Quote - Also, if you add additional parts and need to uv map them, keep in mind lightave can keep track of miltiple UV maps, so you can unwrap your new stuff and use as much uv space as you need.

save out the additions separately, and you can get tyhe uv maps for those very easily, and then toss away that saved additiona object.

I'm not following this. Are you saying that if I take a component, which had previously had to share a texture space with the rest of the Poser object, and export it out, I can give it its own UV mapping, and reimport it into Poser?

Hey Gareee, thank you for the very complete answer! This is just for me, so redistribution/intellectual property issues aren't a problem, but i appreciate you alerting me to the concern.

What does Poser like? great question. Poser is a very clunky legacy application, and takes advantage of very little technical novelty. The PhysX processor is supported by only a few applications, and Poser isn't one of them. Poser wants a very fast processor, multicore (supported only in render), as much memory as you can get, and a very fast hard drive. Hard drive is a big deal, particularly if you have giant libraries of props/figures/textures. Poser does not support the kinds of things seen in Lightwave, 3DS, etc. . . no hardware shaders . . . just a very barebones Open GL implementation. That's all. You should be aware that a new version of Poser, Poser Pro, is supposed to be released "any day now". The best performance solution for Poser is probably Poser Pro + Lightwave.

Quote - Don't bother to export in lwo.. just load the original obj they provided into lightwave.

Just make sure you don;t accidentally write over it, and remember that you MUST apply a map to all materials in order for lightwave to retain the UV info when you export the obj back out.

Thanks for this.

And if I want to substitute the modified version in the old object hierarchy? What should I do? I don't want to overwrite the original

FWIW -- the 3D layer in Photoshop CS3 is garbage, IMO.

Paula refers to some of the issues in her review, but I'll expand on them.

Basically, Photoshop's 3D layer is a very poorly implemented Open GL-like render, without any of the speed of hardware accelerated GL. Dead slow, even on some modest sized models.

Its astonishing to me that Adobe would release such a poor 3D implementation . . .  It is only theoretically useful to a 3D textue painter, who works in Photoshop, and wants  some way of lining up his maps and UV coordinates.

Adobe could have gone and licensed FPrime from Worley, or something like that . . . would have been very, very useful, and worth the upgrade fee. But they didn't, and its not.

fascinating thead, please keep blogging. I'm a big fan of Vue, and am pondering various options to speed up.

Quote - http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2708192&page=1 Check that link. I'm working on just such a figure for M3, called Reslo. Plus since he take Unimesh textures you can actually leave him in the scene if he's not a central figure.

I'm definitely interested. It used to be that there was not much reason to keep stuff in Poser-- the render was dire, so it was just a case of getting models into 3DS or Lightwave. As the renderer improves, I find myself wanting to be able to work with some of the beautiful meshes in Poser. Sanctum Arts "Alpha" character is a great example-- I love him, but at a huge poly count, he's much easier to work with in 3DS . . . which means the headache of importing and rigging. Being able to manipulate this stuff interactively and stay in Poser would be very helpful!, I'll definitely check out Reslo