So can one take an existing model in 3ds format (w/o bones) and add the bones in Poser? Or are there additional steps that need to be taken so that it can be animated and work in Poser?

Ah, that should be fine. Tedious is my middle name :) Plus, if one saves out, lets just say a humpback whale with a simple looping animation, you could then just save the texture map(s) once and keep them on your HD. Last question I promise, but are animated objects able to be saved as vob? Say I looped the animation in Poser, resaved the textures in Photoshop, the import into Vue, reapply textures, save THAT as a vob...will the looping animation be retained? Thanks a TON for your help btw.

Thanks for the response Bruno. Is it possible to resize the texture maps after output somehow?

I must say, I disagree whole heartedly with not being allowed to see threads with the newest replies. I think that missing what someone said in a relevent topic because it's fallen to the 2nd page is WAY worse than having to deal with the occasional bumping of threads. Just my $0.02. The board looks great though. Good work.

Any high-quality tree freebie I will hold on VueRealism.Com for permentant download if requested.

Well I'll do research and it'll be on VueRealism.Com. This lack of training/documentation is frustrating!

Never thought of it that way. It's genius, quite simply. That was how I was doing it. But what happens if the speed of the camera is not supposed to be consistent? Say you want to slow down at parts and then speed up at others because I dont necessarily want a constant speed...how is this done smoothly? I wish there was some good Vue animation training available.

http://www.vuerealism.com/renderchallenge02/oaa_no_taa.wmv

TAA off. Rendered at slightly smaller size. I noticed very little change in the quality moving to no TAA. There's a bit of artifacting in the video, but that's due to the WMV conversion...I cant put up a larger vid for bandwidth reasons. Message edited on: 03/27/2006 10:48

EDIT: It may be Sunday night as I have a building rendering to fix (the one I posted earlier) which is quite intensive.

And I expect that question to be answered over the weekend.

The flicker is better, but you probably need GI at 1.0 or better. (Thanks Phoul...haha). http://www.vuerealism.com/renderchallenge01/tree04.wmv (2.7 MB) Boost = 0 OAA (6,24) TAA off Breeze disabled 15fps = 90 frames = 2 hrs 49mins = (3.5 minutes per frame)

Ahhhh...I never did it that way. I'd edit, hit ok, and then choose 'save object' in the file menu. I never knew they were different. Thanks!

TEST 3 - IGNORE INDIRECT LIGHTING ON PLANTS WITH LOWERED GI

Part 3 of my test. As we saw in the last 2 videos, increasing the GI boost from -1.0 to 1.0 helped a lot, but at the expense of double the rendering time (ack). I'm not a fan of doubling render times unless needed...

For both of those videos, IILOP was left unchecked.

For this test, I've lowered the GI back to -1.0, but have IILOP checked ON now. We'll see what this does to the look of the animation....

What I was surprised to find was I actually had about equal rendering time as with IILOP turned off as I did on. However, the flicker was very evident.

At this point, I've decided never to use GI in an animation until Vue gets the GI speed up a bit. The hit you take is just too rough.

http://www.vuerealism.com/renderchallenge01/tree03.wmv (2.7 MB)

GI Lighting (+0.40, 55%, 50%)
Quality boost = -1.0
Ambience: .30 Sky Dome Gain: .85

User settings
OAA (9,9) = 69%
TAA (4,16) = 85%
Adv Efx Qual: 46%

Wind Disabled
Breeze enabled (40% intensity)
Ignore Indirect Lighting on Plants CHECKED
TGA Sequence

15fps = 150 frames = 6hrs 34mins (5.2 minutes per frame)
2 Computers Rendering

JMC95: Yeah, I tried that. The problem with that is it appears to only really be good for closer shots. I tried to apply a blur via PhotoShop, but I literally had over 5,000 trees in the distance flickering on me and once I got it blurred to a good level for them, the foreground got blurred. But you're right, that IS sometimes an option.

That totally could be. I'm just sort of the type of person who needs to see it first. I just did a 10 second animation with OAA and TAA turned on. Next, I'll do it off. The thing I'm worried about is what turning off TAA will do to things such as brick work or gravel texture, both which can cause "flickering" and jumpiness. It's not that I dont believe you. I know how far ahead of me you are in this stuff.