Quote - No Shawn, it is not a lo-res model, it is V4 straight from DS. And it is a GR HDR lighting model (;

As a modeler i know for sure it is the poly's that are "casting shadows" it is visibly obvious.

Any more ideas ?

-Paul

I may have an idea. Check out my latest post in the thread here, "Vue 8.4 Infinite....." As you can see in my pictures, I am having many texture issues and so are a few others. Are you using the option to import using "Poser Shader Tree"? If so, try turning that off and then import and see if your texture problem goes away. When I turn mine on, I see what looks like serious texture flaws sort of like blotches and dark areas. They are NOT there in Poser Pro 2010 nor are they there in Vue 7 with the Poser Shader Tree option. The only way I found so far to solve it is to turn OFF use Poser Shader Tree.

There are other issues too I find and you should report this to e-on so they know more people are having trouble. Let me know how things go.

Another problem I see is a distorted blotchy looking spots on my skin textures when importing using the option to "render using Poser Shader Tree". The picture here shows what I am talking about. It obviously is NOT there when rendered in Poser Pro 2010. Also, it goes away when you turn OFF the option to not use the Poser Shader Tree. So something is certainly up with that because I did not get this at all in Vue 7 when using the import with Poser Shader Tree option.

I am trying to get help to see what the word is on why this is happening. Hope to have an answer as to what this is and why Vue 7 did not do this.

BTW, does anyone see any sluggish feel when moving Poser characters in Vue 8.4 using the Vue gizmos? My camera, zoom, etc. seems real sluggish even with a reported 89% resources free.

As you can tell from the image, every single PZ3 I try to import is now a gray shade and has texture issues too. I tried all kinds of different settings, such as with and without Poser Shader Tree and nothing seems to have any effect on how things look.

I did not notice this until 8.4 and had it working just fine before. Now, I am not sure what the heck is going on since I can't even get a normal looking import. Does anyone else see this or have issues besides a few of us here? Like I said, it was working before the patch, now, I don't know what would be causing something like this.

Quote - Am I the only person getting Poser 8 imports with rotated parts?!

Poser 8 SR2
Vue 8 intinite 8.4 beta as noted above
windows 7 64 bit

yes, my goblin is getting his knickers in a twist hahaha! :p

Are you doing a PZ3 Poser Import? Are you using the "Poser Shader Tree" option and what other settings?

Is you Poser figure set to be resized automatically on import or manual or turned off?

Quote -  I was looking at the blurb for a new product here in the MP which includes this statement:-
"This is not a merchants resource pack and may not be used as a base for other textures or products, commercial or non commercial.
Do not redistribute and do not rebuild (partial or complete) any of the included files in this product. No portion of the included texture files may be used."

To me that says tat you can't use the texture to create other textures ie you can render with it but you can't modify the texture and render with it??
I know it probably doesn't mean to say this but that is sort of what it is saying dont you think?
Actually I think it implies you can't modify the character either even for your own project.
Love esther

It's simple, just go by the standard EULA here and that is mostly all you need. Otherwise authors could impose such ridiculous terms for every product it would be a mess and no one would know what to do. Renderosity would be swamped every day with users asking questions about every single product if that were the case.

To be able to sell a product here, you must use their standard EULA policy. You can modify it to give the user more freedom, but I have yet to see anyone attempt to make a policy that would go against the standard EULA here. If so, contact Renderosity and ask them to look into it personally and talk with the Author.

Now, I majored in Computer Science and had several Business Law classes for a Business Management. I can read and write legal terms in the USA to a good understanding, but no where close to someone that is an actual lawyer. However, in my opinion given what I do know, what the author is trying to say is:

"This is not a merchants resource pack and may not be used as a base for other textures or products, commercial or non commercial."

1. You may NOT use this product to make your own textures or products for distribution in any form, rather paid or freely given away.

"Do not redistribute and do not rebuild (partial or complete) any of the included files in this product. No portion of the included texture files may be used."

1. You may NOT redistribute or rebuild (i.e. reconstitute/reverse engineer) any files in this product, including the texture files. 

So, that would clearly mean you are free to modify this product (i.e. make your own texture) as you like for your own personal use and then use those modifications in your renders as you see fit. You just can not do anything with those modified files other than use for your own renders. In other words, even though this product appears to be a merchant resource base, you have NOT been given permission to sell anything derived from any modifications that are made using any part of this product.

Quote - > Quote - its theoretically for graphic artists but it seems to have fallen by the wayside a bit along with cuda...

actually Cuda's alive and kicking along with OpenCL. see the developments with Octane Render for an example...

Correct, check out the new nVidia 480GTX cards now hitting the market.

You can see in the detailed specs that both CUDA and OpenCL are supported. Most sites have reviewed this card already such as arstechnica, tomshardware, etc. Another good card that I know a couple of people use is the ATI 5970 which they say is awesome.

Well, SSD drives in general are the best investment you can make to speed up any modern computer. They truly make a LOT of difference in terms of speed for booting your computer, loading files, seeking files, etc. But the cost-performance ratio is quite high and you are paying MUCH more for those increases compared with the value of size a mass storage HD is now.

It will not help Vue at all in terms of making it render faster or perform better in general. What is a good investment is a true 64 bit OS like Snow Leopard or Windows 7 and lots of RAM. Also a very good graphics card helps along with a modern CPU with multi-cores. Also, setting up a render farm if you are serious about speed and doing a lot of high quality renders will help too.

Quote - I have posted there, too, hoping someone who is a subscriber will post the bugs also, because since I'm not a subscriber, my bug reports for 8.4 don't get attention.

Kind of weird that subscribers, in theory, pay less for Vue and get EEF support while non-subscribers pay more (if they also buy the .5 releases) and just get Vue with no support.

Maybe E-on's plan is for the non-subscribers to pay for the subscriber's support?  Or they increased their customer base 10-fold by offering subscriptions, but are now losing money because they are forced to give out .5 releases for free on a routine basis and so not much effort is put into Vue's quality control until a new .0 release begins its push?

Who knows.  We'll see how the 3D economy is a year from now.

Personally, I don't think that is how it works in terms of reporting bugs. As long as you have a valid serial number that is registered with e-on and post on the official e-on Vue 8 forums, it should be the same regardless. The only difference is there was SUPPOSED to be guaranteed tech support on the paid for forums when you posted an issue they would respond in 24 hours. Now, I must say that many on that PAID forum are complaining because if you look at the posts there as an subscriber, it is totally dead. There is no one patrolling that forum either and more than several people that paid for that support are complaining about this. We PAID for someone to be there and for a guaranteed service that no one seems to be getting.

So, I don't know what is going on because even those that PAID more for their special tech support and EFF are not seeing ANYONE helping or responding to posts in that forum. It's as though e-on is having lots of trouble leaving some in that forum to wonder just how stable e-on is given the service they are not receiving. It sure seems like there have been cut backs at their company, at least from their tech support/programmers.

Quote - Build 51487 does not fix any of the problems I had with 50777.  Did e-on fire a programmer that knew how Vue worked?

I would encourage you to make sure and post your problems on the official e-on forum and let them know. There are several posts there about trouble with 8.4. Also, many have found network rendering problems, especially if there is an Mac OS somewhere in the chain.

It's not just you, many have said the 8.4 beta is FAR from being a reliable update for them. So, it appears e-on needs to spend a LOT more time working on it from those accounts.

Quote - The way people smile is different (but not too much, if it's a real smile). The way jaw, facial muscles, etc. work is the same. And the way the uniqueness of the character fades with emotional facial expression applied is actually right. That's how it works in real life, too.

However, as a separate point, custom morphs can affect how basic facial expressions work. That's the problem with morphs in general (or blend shapes or shape keys or whatever they call it) in any 3d package - they can conflict with each other.

That's certainly true. I use ZBrush to do custom sculpting on Daz figures like V4/M4 and if you get a character you want, regardless of it looking like a real life person, facial expressions MUST be tweaked.

If you buy a general expression package like from here and then try them on a custom morphed V4 figure, most likely you will need to do some tweaking at the very least. Typically bought expressions are not meant to work with meshes that have been altered in programs like ZB. That is why I usually end up doing facial expressions by hand because if you use those created by others they simply do not work as well and tend to be too strong.

Now, just as in real life, if a person smiles big, laughs big, etc. their face will be distorted because it is not in a general neutral position.

The biggest key to getting a realistic render of a character are many factors. First, you need a very good skin texture which most figures have now, based on real skin photos from places like 3d.sk. Do NOT change them to a lower res, use whatever the default is such as 4000x4000 pixels. Leave everything else in high res too (eyes, hair, etc.) Then make sure everything is setup in the Poser Material Room and do a test render there just to check, don't worry about lighting, that will be setup in the more high end 3D program. Second, import your Poser character into Vue, leave the Poser shader option checked when importing. Third, put your posed Poser import character into the scene and work on lighting.

Now, it will all depend upon what the scene is and if it will be a day or night scene. Here, lighting is always key to a great render. In fact, it is just as, if not more important than anything else. That is why you MUST have a good understanding of how lighting works for the 3D program you are working in. If you still are not happy, try Skin Vue 8 and see for yourself, but NOTHING is a substitute for doing some manual tweaking of the shaders and understanding lighting inside Vue.

Keep in mind, some settings in Skin Vue REPLACES the shaders that you imported with your Poser figures. Just make sure you know what you are working with because you may or may not want to replace them. The image here is just a simple import with NO tweaks or use of Skin Vue or other skin enhancers, just standard Poser mats.

I do this all the time using programs like Vue 8 Infinite, VRay, C4D, etc. and mainly just use Poser Pro 7 (now testing 2010) for character setup along with material room changes. So, I can tell you that yes, the two are different in terms of how the skins are shaded. Typically, I leave the import Poser skin shaders turned on for importing into Vue. Then I go into Vue Advanced Material Editor and hand tweak the settings for all the materials.

The biggest key to getting a realistic render of a character are many factors. First, you need a very good skin texture which most figures have now, based on real skin photos from places like 3d.sk. Do NOT change them to a lower res, use whatever the default is such as 4000x4000 pixels. Leave everything else in high res too (eyes, hair, etc.) Then make sure everything is setup in the Poser Material Room and do a test render there just to check, don't worry about lighting, that will be setup in the more high end 3D program. Second, import your Poser character into Vue, leave the Poser shader option checked when importing. Third, put your posed Poser import character into the scene and work on lighting.

Now, it will all depend upon what the scene is and if it will be a day or night scene. Here, lighting is always key to a great render. In fact, it is just as, if not more important than anything else. That is why you MUST have a good understanding of how lighting works for the 3D program you are working in. If you still are not happy, try Skin Vue 8 and see for yourself, but NOTHING is a substitute for doing some manual tweaking of the shaders and understanding lighting inside Vue.

Keep in mind, some settings in Skin Vue REPLACES the shaders that you imported with your Poser figures. Just make sure you know what you are working with because you may or may not want to replace them.

I do this all the time using programs like Vue 8 Infinite, VRay, C4D, etc. and mainly just use Poser Pro 7 (now testing 2010) for character setup along with material room changes. So, I can tell you that yes, the two are different in terms of how the skins are shaded. Typically, I leave the import Poser skin shaders turned on for importing into Vue. Then I go into Vue Advanced Material Editor and hand tweak the settings for all the materials.

The biggest key to getting a realistic render of a character are many factors. First, you need a very good skin texture which most figures have now, based on real skin photos from places like 3d.sk. Do NOT change them to a lower res, use whatever the default is such as 4000x4000 pixels. Leave everything else in high res too (eyes, hair, etc.) Then make sure everything is setup in the Poser Material Room and do a test render there just to check, don't worry about lighting, that will be setup in the more high end 3D program. Second, import your Poser character into Vue, leave the Poser shader option checked when importing. Third, put your posed Poser import character into the scene and work on lighting.

Now, it will all depend upon what the scene is and if it will be a day or night scene. Here, lighting is always key to a great render. In fact, it is just as, if not more important than anything else. That is why you MUST have a good understanding of how lighting works for the 3D program you are working in. If you still are not happy, try Skin Vue 8 and see for yourself, but NOTHING is a substitute for doing some manual tweaking of the shaders and understanding lighting inside Vue.

Keep in mind, some settings in Skin Vue REPLACES the shaders that you imported with your Poser figures. Just make sure you know what you are working with because you may or may not want to replace them. I'm attaching a non slightly tweaked Poser import with no skin shader enhancements at all and no big tweaks to the lighting either for you to see just a simple test.

Quote - it wasnt render quality i was concerned about 3dneo, it was the picture i made that was awful.  Nothing to do with vue, all down to me and lack of sleep/time :P

I havent run it through to the end with a renderfarm yet becuase I had to get it to a deadline and it felt quicker/more sensible to use a single pc than half of my faster processor and a much slower processor to do the same job.

I can try doing the renderfarm again and see if it goes up to 100% when out of prepass or if it keeps to 50% all the time.

OK, thanks for clearing up the render quality part because I thought you were saying you could actually see a difference in quality between a networked render and a single computer render and that should never be happening.

I would be interested in hearing your results when you do it again. From what I thought, it should use the full power of the main computer then distribute the rest over all computers networked so it should be going at full capacity I would think for all of them (just divided over the distributed systems).

Quote - I found my main quad core content creator would only run around 50% CPU on a network render and all 4 cores would be 100% on a local render. I stopped using Rendercows until I could get all 5 up to fast dual cores or quad cores with 4gb ram each. (1 upgrade left to go). I will use the same render farm for PoserPro 2010.

ALSO PLEASE DON'T EXPECT IT TO CUT THE RENDER TIME IN HALF. WITH YOUR SETUP EXPECT ABOUT A 15% SPEEDUP

If you would, send me a PM here. I am curious as to your setup because I have two computers now I am using but want to expand that and would like to discuss more on that with you. With 5 different dedicated machines with those specs, you should be getting awesome render times.