Great! Thank you very much.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=358130&Start=37&Artist=Rochr&ByArtist=Yes

The volumetric blue plasma in this image is something I have been trying to duplicate without success in Vue for two years. Can this be done in either Vue4 of 5? If in 4, please tell me how. If in 5, please show me that I might start saving for the upgrade now.

In Vue4, when a material is designated as volumetric, the color properties change to allow a single color. Unless I've truly missed something, all of the complexity is within the density settings. But the color of the object stays the same all the way through. Have I truly missed something in Vue4? If so, I'll have to check when I get home and apologize for my ignorance. If I'm right, has this changed in Vue5? Can the color of the object be made as complex as the density?

Another reason for the import function was just pointed out in another thread... If, for some reason, you need to render a wireframe image of your scene, you could do so in Poser.

If alpha planes is cheating then so is the blue screen in movies or matte backgrounds and they give awards for those. Sometimes it is not worth the time or RAM needed to create an object from the groundplane up. It is the end result that matters. I'm willing to bet you that had you not pointed out that the first image was an alpha plane, you'd have gotten many compliments on your modelling skills. Your lighting, and plane placement are fantastic and disguise the plane's flatness brilliantly.

Bryce seems not to like the taskbar. I can't, with XP anyway, multitask through the task bar for this reason. If Bryce is open, I can't open anything else without alt-tabbing. Which is sad to note, because I should have made drac's suggestion right off thinking about it now. :

Oh well, I was going the long way around. Good call drac.

What version of winblows is this? With 2K or XP, in the applications window of the Task Manager (cntrl/alt/del), you should be able to select the ap and then 'Switch To' in the lower part of that window. You may also need to leave this alone until you are certain Bryce has stopped rendering (in my case next week :) and if switch to doesn't work then (check CPU usage in Processes) you may be out of luck. If this is Win95 or 98, I can't remember if 'Switch To' is an option. Hope you get this working, Will

A thought occurred to me, that as I said this should be winter, so if you just changed the texture of the terrain to resemble snow, you won't have lost that work. The detail of the footprints is fantastic.

Not to nit pick but... The Cherokee would not be on horses. The trail of tears was a forced march with the Cherokee ripped from there homes in the middle of the night. They were not even allowed to take their own blankets, and those supplied by the Union Army had been infected with small pox. Having a Union officer menacing the tribes people on a horse may be a little more accurate. Also there is no desert between Georgia and Oklahoma. And this march happened during the winter. Just trying to be helpfull, but as a part Cherokee I had to say something.

I see that the leaves are casting shadows on the unicorn so you may need to check the material setting for the unicorn to make sure that it imported from Poser casting shadows. Other then that, this is a very nice composition. Just make sure to anti-alias your final render.

Vue will support many of the export formats that Rhino has. I use both .obj and .3ds files for my work. I've switched to .obj just because I'm doing more work in Poser but when I want to import an item straight into Vue I use .3ds. 3ds files are compressed and I find them to be easier to deal with. Vue will save a .obj and .3ds at about the same size, but the original model takes up far less space. If you are worried about texturing the models for use in Vue, Ultimate Unwrap (thanks MightyPete) will map both file types.

AgentSmith, First off, thank you very much for this offering. This material is extraordinary. Secondly, thank you for giving Vue a chance. I'm a Vue/Brycer and I've found it hard to read the Bryce forum of late due to the frothingly negative comments about Vue. It seems that nerves have been strained with Corels latest problems. The only response I have for those comments is, I'd like to see any of them try to duplicate this Vue render with a pack of crayons. :) This is really great stuff. I hope I can reverse engineer it and get some incite into Vue materials.

This ia a common occurance in Bryce with Mike. This happens when the Eyebrow objects intersects with the forehead. Vic and Steph don't have this problem because the natural position of both eyebrows does not intersect. What this looks like to me, is that there is a morph target forcing the eyebrow objects to intersect with the forehead and thus the interaction. If the character map uses the eyebrow objects, try either selecting and moving the eybrow objects SLIGHTLY away from the face or checking the face settings in Poser and reimporting. If the texture does not utilize the eyebrows, delete them. Hope this helps, Will

That's an even better fix. :) Really nice work so far.