Thanks Dale - will give this a go and post back the results. tlaloc321 - those are excellent renders and it has certainly some of the better ones I've seen. However, there is still a 'hard' edge which makes it look digital (eg around the eyes in the last picture). I looked at your gallery and was very impressed but I still think the Poser renders you did were softer than the VUE ones. Cheers

Dale B - thanks for the suggestions but I have to say, I have experiemented a lot with Vue and dropping the lighting makes things an awful lot worse. Even with Radiosity, the less light you have the more 'plastic' the skin looks. I have to compensate by turning the lighting intensity up. I believe Vue4 pro (and hence Infinite) have the ability for a light source to affect a particular object without affecting anything else so that may help a bit (ie the uniform in the picture above wouldn't be so bright).
Again, I'd definately be interested in seeing any Vue5 stuff that looks good straight out of the box when rendering skin. There are some realistic renders in the gallery but they definately look like they have had a lot of Postwork done (Postwork is not much use if you are trying to animate a scene)
Wasn't sure what you meant about the inverse ambient lighting -could you explain that a bit more?
Cheers

Just a word of caution before you get too enthusiastic. I have played around with most of Vue5's settings and kept my eye on the Vue 5 gallery and have yet to see a really good photo-realistic render of a figure compared to what you can get with posers render engine. Poser is optimised for skin shading but with Vue you get more of a clinical 3d-looking finish. Somebody PLEASE prove me wrong because Vue does add fantastic scenery generation but I just don't think renders of people give me the realism I am looking for. As an example, look at the two renders I've provided. They are of the same pz3 but one is rendered in Vue5 (right image) and the other in Poser5 (left image). I think it shows the difference in the skin shading (remember Vue doesn't import all the Poser5 material shaders (yet!). Maybe Vue5 Infinite is different?

Thanks for the help. Looks liek it was the bump map - when I removed it the image did improve. I thought I had removed teh bump map previously but because you have to select the 'Torso' part of the skin to see the textures associated with it I had missed that. I hope P6 has a way of applying the same texture to all the parts Thanks again

And to be fair to CL, they did offer a discount to 'early adopters' of P5. All in all I paid 56.16 for Poser6 to my door (that includes VAT and Delivery!). Now thats not a huge amount to pay for an upgrade that promises more than a few cool new features. Who knows, perhaps when Poser 7 comes out, maybe we'll get a discount on that for being early adopters of Poser6! Lets face it, would you rather get Poser 6 early and live with a few bugs that will be eventually fixed or wait a few more months until the problems have been totally ironed out. Me? I'd be grateful to get to play with it right now even if it did crash a few times on my computer.

Thanks for the info everyone - thats cleared this up a bit. Cheers

dlk30341: because they don't look as 'natural' as what you get with booleans. The 'dug' sides look smooth rather than bumpy.

Hmmm...Strange, because you can double-click a procedural terrain and then edit it it the same as normal terrains. I would have thought this too would have been impossible if it was a complicated mathmatical definition. Another questions is that when I try to apply one of the materials that cme with Vue to the procedural terrain it warns me that the mapping mode has to be changed. Do you need to use special materials for this typoe of terrain and if not, why is this question always asked?

thanks for the advise. I have sent DAZ an email and will let you all know what the outcome is. Cheers and Happy New Year to you all

Actually I was thinking of heading over to RuntimeDNA and picking up the ShadowOps clothing pak and the v3 Spacemarines expansion pak. This includes a camo texture which may pass as a modern soldiers outfit. Also, this set would double up nicely for any future sci-fi scenes as well. Runtime have a sale on at the minute so i could get everything for just over $12. Thanks again for all your help folks

Thanks spook - thats the sort of thing I was looking for. A little pricey though- if it were around the $15 mark it would be perfect!

Thanks for the suggestion EngishBob. Unfortunately when I go to the site and try to access the store and some of the other pages I get some sort of browser script error. This alone would make me wary of buying a subscription as I would not be able to access the content). The previews page just has textual descriptions so you can't just look for what you want by browsing thumbnails. Do you have a link to the specific items mentioned above. maybe its my browser settings or something Cheers

not sure if this would achive the result I'm looking for war2. Although the background image would be in focus there is no way to create a seamless ground-plane to cast shdaows onto using an alphoplane . Using Environment mapping, the ground-plane is created 'magically' and will receive shadows. I'm trying a few more tests and will post some results if I get any further

DOH! Just realised that the competition I entered requested the entry be done in Poser so the link above may get deleted at some point. Actully come to think of it, since postwork is allowed on the image theres no reaon why it can't be a heavily postworked (by Vue) image (and the bus WAS exported out of Poser). Oh well, thats a separate topic I guess ;-)

Thanks for the info - still not sure I understand completely about HDRI but I am convibced there must be some way to optimize the image size. I've been doing some tests today which look quite promising - I'll post some results when I have completed them - I think you may be quite impressed (well I am anyway!) ;-) Later guys