I have had this problem too. It is a feature, not a bug :-)

Check out the Limit OpenGL polygons settings. By default in Vue 7 it is 500,000 wich is quite low. If your scene has more than this, it goes back to displaying boxes.

I have put it at 10,000,000 (with a GeForce 8800 512mb of memory).

It would be interesting to have recommended settings depending on video chips and memory.

Quite strange that E-On did not correct the texture problem for the roofs of the Sponza church in the demo scenes :-)

I re-rendered the benchmark scene I used in my Vue benchmark (spacecraft over landscape) in 9'39" in Vue 7 instead of 36'22" in Vue 6.6.
I rendered the scene straight after importing, but there are slight differences between the Vue 7 and Vue 6 renders:

• Vue 7 has more detailed clouds
• the antialiasing is different. More accurate and finer.

(click to view full-size image)

Also, Vue 7 renders images with a 1 pixel offset from the top :-)

After purchasing my new rig, I have made Vue and Bryce benchmarks on three computers :

• a Toshiba laptop
• an AMD 64X2 4600 (a bit like yours, though less powerful)
• a Quad core Q9450 (tested with and without overclocking)

Vue Infinite is far faster on the Quad core than on the other two as it makes full use of the 4 cores.
I make tests with a custom scene and VueMark and get rather similar results.

I am just installing Vue 7 right now and will probably benchmark it vs Vue 6... on two machines only as I now know I cannot install it on the three :-)

When I started using Vue, a year ago or so, I felt it was the most unstable piece of software I had used since Bryce 3.0 or Amapi 6.
Things did get better with the current version, but I still have crashes. Some are reproductible and most are probably not due to a system overload or video card setting.

I just started it in order to prove myself I could still crash it at will. Created a terrain, started painting an ecosystem of plants on it. Did CTRL+Z. Vue did not crash (previous versions did) but the terrain disappeared. CTRL+Z cancelled the terrain creation, not the ecosystem painting ;-)

Vue bugs are annoying, because they generally lead to an application crash or even scene corruption. But there are also many quirks with the interface. The main one is the fact that the display constantly flickers when you edit a scene, move a camera, etc. I thought it came from my video card but saw it on a Geekatplay studio tutorial.

Bryce 6 is more stable than Vue 6 and its terrain display more detailed and does not flicker. All this affects your confidence to work with this software.

I have not done bug reporting yet as I feel I am not a beta tester and doubt it can be useful without having access to the bug list with their status. I will probably do it once I get Vue 7 if things are still that bad.

It is supposed to prompt you for a location to install the wxPython files.  The default location is wherever your $ProgramFiles/E-ons Software folder is.  Perhaps it's not picking this up on Vista.

The WXPython installer did not get the right folder. It proposed *C:Program Files/*e-on Software/Vue 7 Infinite. And when I changed this manually, I was not sure it installed it in the right place.

But is works OK now, including on Michael 4. I took advantage of the update to make a test and a post on my website. 

One question: when importing a character with hair as a separate object, I assume I have to choose only the character body, not the group, before swapping materials?
Also, I get a small error message when I choose a character on which materials have already been swapped, but it is not really a problem.

Yes, it is probably a Vista quirk.

On my Vista 64 (French version), I have two different folders for program files.

One is : C: Program Files (x86), the other is named C:Programmes (in French), but it is only a display name. Its real name is C:Program Files.

When installing SkinVue and the Python scripts, it always seemed to end up in the wrong place: It created a C:/ Program Files (x86)/e-on Software/Vue 6 Infinite folder instead of installing it in the C:/ Programmes/e-on Software/Vue 6 Infinite one.

Installing it outside of any C:Program files folder and then relocating it manually worked for me.

I'd like to add one thing : the texture I used for M4 in Poser (mid res one from M4 complete) give his skin a yellowish tint in Vue. The use of skinvue solves the problem.

I did a three fold test too yesterday.

• Michael 4 import in Vue
• Install of SkinVue on my 64 bits OS
• Test of Skinvue for M4

I hope we will soon have decent medieval clothing for him, apart from the existing Valiant for M4. I also think I will be missing products like the ones of John Malis (Viking, RPG series) and will probably stick to M3 for many of my scenes.

I had the same problem. Typing import wx in the console did an error.

I installed all the python files in a separate directory, then cut and pasted them manually in the Vue 6 directory.

Works normally now.

I wrote to Luc about Vue as we were discussing on one of my images. He then started to work a bit in Vue... then went back to Terragen and made this image:

Before using Terragen, Luc used Bryce, just as I did and we started exchanging emails about it. This was probably in 1999/2000.

As for the layers, I have tried a bit, but this will probably need many tries before I get what I want.

Did you use displacement materials for this one?

Also, I am concerned about the second image. Maybe applying material displacement to large rock shaped meshes may be the path to creating overhangs such as this one?

I have tried, but the main problem is that I want large displacement features AND smaller bumps on top of it.

I had done the same a while ago with my setup at: http://www.virtual-lands-3d.com/A-computer-for-3d.html
I have just updated it with my latest addition (a Velociraptor).

I regularly use birds purchased at DAZ.

I have the eagle 2, eagle expansion pack (lots of birds of prey), and some birds by third party vendor Noggin who has seagulls, crows, pigeons, owls and geese. The native DAZ birds look very nice with elaborate feather transparency and very detailed textures. I find that Noggin has the habit of placing the eyes of his models too much on the side (especially true for the crows and seagulls), but otherwise they are quite good and include most of the poses you need.

You can also check out the songbird series also, for lots of smaller birds.

I use a 8800 GTS with 512 Mb of RAM and once found that I had loaded too many textures for the card. I had imported a building from DM and Vue started to get slow as hell.

After this, I started to search which graphic cards had more memory than 512 Mb and found a few models on the Nvidia side:

• the Geforce 260 GTX has 896 Mb
• the more expensive 280 GTX has 1 Gb

On the ATI side, there are more models above 512 Mb of memory. PowerColor proposes two models of Radeon HD 4850 with either 1 Gb or 2 Gb of DDR3 and one model of Radeon HD 4870 with 1 Gb of DDR5. The main problem is finding these as the 2 Gb model seems to be rare (at least in France)
 

Dave-So, I advise you not to try to purchase an additional Vista license from Microsoft. I did and I can tell you that E-On is still far more efficient. I had to make three phone calls to Germany (from France) in order to get my license number... 10 days after ordering it online.