Quote - Normally when Vue gets out of memory, you get a warning about (normally....) Did you try rendering without displcement?

Wow, you called it.  While I was testing, I thought I had removed all the displacement, but I missed a few.  Turning off displacement for everything allowed the render to finish at my resolution of choice.

Is there an explanation for why displacement causes Vue to crash?  Have later versions of Vue resolved this issue?

Thanks so much for your suggestion!

LH

Quote - Are you using: Ctrl + D, Cmd + D on the MAC to Duplicate?

Ctrl + D for me sets in the same place as does the Replicator Menu up at top of the work window if I have a no value in any of the boxes.

Yes I use Cmd+D to duplicate.  The problem is still occuring in varying degrees (might depend on the scale of the objects).

What do you mean when you say 'no values in any of the boxes'?  Do you mean I can only dupe correctly if the object is at the scene's origin with default scaling?

LH

I've tried Silo, Modo, Wings3D, Hexagon, Blender, Sketchup, Cinema4D and Cheetah3D (I'm a mac person).

I can't vouch for how compatible the app is with Poser, but for me Silo was the easiest and best tool for modeling out of all of them, and I often use my Silo models in Vue.  I really like being able to custom-configure my mouse and keyboard functions so I can work as fast (read: intuitively) as possible.  UV mapping may not be the greatest, but I do the mapping in Silo too.

It weighs in at about $150 and there's a PC version.

As an aside, I don't know how anybody gets modeling done in 3DS Max; that is one of the most cluttered, complicated, confusing and non-intuitive interfaces I've ever seen.  More power to you for getting anything done in it. :)

LH

Quote - Ravyns yes I have tried wings. Look at my gallery to see. It also has a lot of limitation. I need something more roboost that doesn't cost over a thousand dollars.

With respect to modeling on the mac, I've tried Silo 3D, Wings 3D, Cheetah 3D, Google Sketchup, Modo, Hexagon and Blender.  My favorite of all these was Silo3D, and that's what I've been using.  It felt extremely intuitive and easy to use.  I prefer having keyboard shortcuts for almost everything since it really speeds up the creative process and Silo (along with several if not most of the others) allows me to configure my own preferred setup.  It occasionally has stability issues, but I'm pretty careful when it comes to making copies and backups so it hasn't been a problem.  Please be aware Silo has no internal renderer.

Vue and Bryce aren't modeling programs, so it's better to have the right tool, a modeling program, for the job.  It's cool that people are able to psuedo-model some amazingly creative stuff with terrains, but Vue and Bryce are landscape/environment generating programs by nature.

It's interesting to hear someone mention their kickass machine was unable to run Vue; I've had all sorts of speed and stability issues with Vue in the past and basically stopped at Vue 7 Infinite.  Sad, too, because its renders look incredibly good.

It sucks that Bryce 7 won't run on Lion but that is one of the drawbacks of moving to a new OS.  One of my favorite music plugins didn't make the jump from PPC to Intel and I was extremely disappointed.  I had to find a substitute for that plugin and once I did, my frustration and disappointment (slowly) faded away.  That's progress for you.

LH

Figured it out:

You need to make the palm the parent of all the knuckles.  Then whenever you tranform the palm, all the fingers are affected.  Also, to save the object to your library as a whole 'rigged' hand, you only have to select the palm and all the fingers come with it.

Woot!

Quote - By "linked" do you mean each finger/knuckle assembly is grouped?  If so you may have to be careful to select each group of objects (including the booleaned palm) then group the total.  Bryce won't let you select a portion of one group and then group it into another.

No, they're linked, where the knuckle is the joint's parent, and the joint is the finger bone's parent, etc.  The only group is the boolean palm.  I would think it's a simple matter of grouping the whole thing...but maybe not.

LH

Well I tried exporting from both Daz 3 and Poser 7 and they both imported into B6 just fine.  Poser 7 seemed a tiny bit easier but not enough to swing the vote dramatically.

One thing I noticed is transparency maps on things like eyelashes didn't come over properly; that was the case with both programs.  I was able to get that working with by using grayscale inverted versions of the eyelashes.

I tried the same thing for hair but was unable to achieve the 'wispiness' of the hair you see in D3/P7; in B6 they just looked like layered strips with the hair material added.  Has anyone gotten figure hair to look as good as it does in Daz or Poser, or should I just quit while I'm ahead?

LH

Quote - It lives!!!!! Well I took the casing off and cleaned out a lot of dust from the inside including the fans and so far all seems well. No problems after being on 2 hrs at the moment. Keeping my fingers crossed.

Could be an intermittent fan on the CPU or video card, which is why it wasn't working and is now working again.  In my experience when a PC shuts down completely all by itself with little or no warning, it's usually because the CPU overheated and the mobo shuts itself off as an emergency precaution.  Same thing could happen with the video card and its GPU.

The next time you have the problem, boot up with the case off and make sure the fans on the CPU and video cards are spinning.

LH

Quote - my nitemare.. esp when power shuts out here..which is like..ten times a day

If this is a major concern, especially if you're a professional, I would recommend getting a UPS (uninterruptible power supply) for your desktop and monitor.  If your power drops, the UPS will switch to battery for a certain period of time.  UPS' also do some degree of line conditioning, I think, to cope with flakey utility power.  How long the battery lasts depends on how much draw your desktop has.  A UPS won't be any good (besides the line conditioning) if your power outages last hours at a time.

I always use American Power Conversion (APC) units.

my two cents,

LH

Orbital   3
dan whiteside   2
zorzim   1

Excellent work.

Quote - As an extension to what Cherryman described, you also use the replicate function and set the rotation around the pivot center  for each object and the number of objects in one quick step to evenly distribute the objects around your circle (rather than click and drag...). For example, 3 additional copies offset at 90 degree around z will give you four objects arranged in a circle, 7 additional ones at 45 degree give you a total of eight and so on...

Thanks!  That worked great.