Attached Link: http://www.turbosquid.com

It's not the lighting that makes the image look dull. I'm not sure what "dull" stands for here, I think you mean sort of graininess in an image?
This is mainly caused by the simple fact that Vue can handle "only" 25 sub-rays. You can see it in extremely soft shadows and when using strong depth of field.
For comparison, Bryce 5 can smack images with 256 rays per pixel -meaning eternity-slow rendering but good quality of an image if other parts of Bryce-image are set OK.

I have no idea if Vue Pro handles more sub-rays -I was going to ask it when starting this post- so I can't tell whether images rendered with VuePro differ from Vue4-stills

I'm pretty new to Vueing around, but when I was asked to make an animation of tornado hitting a house, I had to choose between Lightwave and Vue. I chose making that 3second tv-spot with Vue because of the number of sub-rays -the grains gave the effect of dirt to be blown around. In action that meant lots of faster rendering with somewhat neat result.

Again, I'm new to Vueing and therefore don't know how "seniors" post-produce their still images with, but I've found that when making stills with strong DoF or soft lighting, programs like Neat Image Pro and Photoshop are my best friends: NIpro kicks grain out of the image and color correction and enhancement can be done in Photoshop.

Images in Renderosity's galleries, I think, are mostly made with only rendering image in Vue -if you post image through dozen different programs, the result is hardly an image only fitting to Vue d'Esprit gallery.

Hope this answered your question -even touched the topic:)

.mjt

I have Bryce in it's box, but I honestly dont think I should use a 500kb program and then convert it with 100meg program. doesn't make much sense to me:) I was a little fed up using 3dsmax as a tex tool, I already have M$ Word which is 80meg text tool. A friend of mine pointed me towards a script for 3dsmax which basically does texting automatically -hope the next version of it writes the text itself too... .hilt

..but that's not even an option for me:D

"I don't have such a tutorial on my site Hilt, but we have one in the backroom:-)" Saved by the bell then:D -Hilt Great day so far: Opera crashes, Vue crashes, Dreamweaver has also crashed this morning. I guess it's back iExplorer, Paint and Notepad for me:(

rofl
I was just writing a reply to husse "visit www.guitta.net and thy problems shall be solved".
Previewing message showed that you made it first, gebe:)

-Hilt
...and the old wise man said, "Hmmph".

Time for some serious concentrating I guess:)

-Hilt

Just checking but you're not using any nifty codecs, xVid or DivX, to pack animation? -Hilt

I recall the days when there was a verbal fight between Amiga 500 and Atari ST users, especially in UK but also here in Finland. Which one was better? Noone knows but both had their fans for reason. 15 years after that it is PC vs Mac. And I like it :D The only thing that prevents me from getting a Mac, I think, is the price. Personally, Macs look great and OSX can handle mousewheel and other best parts of PCs, but the design doesnt lower the price for sure. I have a dream that one day Apple would start manufacturing Macs as chips you can install into regular PC-box (or vice versa would be nice too). ("forget the ridicilous loading of OS from harddrive!", the ads yell.) Remove the Mac-chip and replace it with PC-chip if you're in windowing. Or have them both in your machine at the same time -there are cellular phones that take two SIM-cards too :D That's my vision of perfect computing world. Till that kind of innovation hits the markets I stick with my cheap-but-powerful-PC and secretly envy anyone who has more-expensive-but-powerful-and-beautiful-laptop-Mac. But both are still ridicilously expensive and crashy pencils:)

Bryce has it's own weirdo sides, as in Vue. I have 4.12 Mover and it's surprisingly stable and pretty fast too. When it comes to Mac/PC, and you're planning to use computer mainly on 3D, I prefer PC. Ignore the OS, MacX and WinXP are both stable (XP less, naturally), in 3D you need raw power and lots of memory from computer, and till Mac G5 uses Intel processors (meaning more gigas) it lacks the gigahertzs needed for faster rendering/viewing. Then again, I still use Amiga 500 (5Mhz, 1Mb memory) to play games :D

Thank you for your replies. Without them I'd still be staring at monitor and cursing. I removed X- and Z-trans from character's hip, which made him stay in place, but that wasn't enough. Mike was bumping along Y-axis -dont know if the BVH was modeled in stairs or was the BVH-file somehow corrupted. So I removed translations from Y-axis also. Now Mike was staying in place but was appr. 40 Poser-units up in the air. After a little thinking I decided to rescale Mike and his clothes (and bottle he was holding) to 200%. Now he was 20 units in the air. I could've rescale him even more to make him match the size the BVH-file meant (and thus solve the problem just by rescaling), but this would have make the textures look blurry. I decided not to use Photoshop-addon Genuine Fractals to make the textures larger. So it was time to use the Y-axis to place him on ground. Voila! there it was, a drunken Mike walking off the cliff :) I'm rendering the animation in vue d'Esprit, so I made the walkpath in that program. Using Poser's walkpath would've been easier, as I'm not that familiar with looking at wireframed objects. Using auto-scaling made Mike's shoulders go higher than his hair -that looked funny but not realistic at all. I tried to auto-scale Mike against the BVH-file and then adjust the shoulders to normal position from all keyframes (ie. frame 1 and then remove the rest of them keyframes). With a little more patience that would have also worked well. Thanks for helping me out of this, again:) -Hilt

Any news when 4.2 is going to see the public daylight? on June 16 eonsoftware claimed 'later this month'. I have Poser5 in a box but havent bothered to use it before I get to use it with Vue/Mover4. -Hilt

water and mood are excellent, imho. the color of sky and water match 100 per cent. it seems from the waves that there's pretty windy out there -wonder if those candles could take much wind without gasoline:) is there an object behind the two candles -or should I finally clean my monitor? hard to tell from an small image. far above nice, bernie. -hilt