Hi Philywebrider, here's what I did to get my different glass materials in the appropriate preview group (i.e., glasses): 1) Open the Vue application folder / Materials. 2) Open the preview group folder you want your downloaded materials to appear in. For our example, open "Glasses". 3) Rename the file "material.prv" to something different like "material.bak", or delete the file. 4) All the materials that ship with Vue start with a number and an underscore to define the order in what they'll appear in the materials browser. Copy your dowloaded material into the folder, and rename the material accordingly. For our example, copy your glass material into the glasses folder, and rename it to 30_Yet another glass.mat. (There's 29 glass materials in said folder, hence the 30_ .) 5) Start Vue, and browse to the materials group you added the downloaded .mat to. In our case, that's "Glasses". Vue will automatically generate a new material.prv including your freshly added materials. To change the preview texts (i.e. Title and Description), open the material in Vue's material editor and hit the Save button. Enter a suitable title and Description, and save it at it's desired location (i.e. materials group folder) with the appropriate name (i.e. [number]_[filename].mat). To add a new folder in the materials browser, just create the folder e.g. in the Materials directory, open Vue, go to the materials browser, and hit "New". Browse to your new folder (say, "downloads"), select a material in said folder, and hit OK. Enter the name you want the folder to appear with in the materials browser (e.g. "Downloaded Materials"), and you're done. In this case, you won't need to number the materials unless you want to predefine the order in what the materials will be listed. Hope this helps, -Sascha.rb

OK, just read the datasheet to Vue Pro. Textures are converted into (bitmapped) UV texture maps. You can chose the level of detail you need, and Vue will export the textures "with a minimum of distortion." But the wind looks nice. Might still consider getting Vue Pro. 93, -Sascha.rb P.S. be sure to download the demoreel from www.e-onsoftware.com. It's quite something. -.rb

Hi Yves, well, that's weird--I got my CE+ a month ago, too. Welcome to the Cinema4D community. :D I myself will stick around with Vue, mind, as I still think it's one of the best landscape modeling applications out there. And I quite enjoy including some landscapes from time to time. ;) All the best, -Sascha.rb P.S. be sure to download the "Cutter" plugin for C4D, much better than Maxon's knife tool even in release 8 of C4D. -.rb

Hi Lynn,

"
-Single objects and complete scenes can be exported to high end 3D applications, including 3DS Max, Cinema 4D, LightWave, Maya, Softimage XSI and others;
[...]

-Full scene export and tree export will include all texturing.
"

I don't want to sound like a party pooper, but--alarm bells are ringing. I definetely hope there will be a demo of Vue 4Pro out during the sidegrade period. As is, the listed render applications have vastly different approaches for procedural textures and shaders, often varying even between different versions of one software package.

Unless Vue simply converts all texturing into bitmaps (not acceptable), I can't see any technically feasible way to import Vue's prodedural textures in any other render app without either a lot of hassle on the end user's side to tweak textures after importing a scene, or lots and lots of development and support time on e-on's to write plugins for all listed "and other" applications to even support stuff like Vue's "influence of slope" mapping option. I won't even mention the "procedural types" and mixing algorithms.

But then, I wouldn't mind being pleasently surprised. :) I'll definetely keep my eyes open for the Demo.

All in all: Great news! So please excuse my scepticism.

93,
-Sascha

Attached Link: http://www.noctua-graphics.de/deutsch/Tutorial/seamless/01.htm

Frankly, I don't know why your water exhibits such heavy tiling--see the image attached to my posting for a quick look on how it should look. Procedural textures tile automatically, or rather don't tile at all. ;) If you see reoccuring patterns, try different settings in the function editor, scale the texture, or change your POV.

For texture maps as in your second image, you'll need tileable, seamless textures. There's no other way to get around the repeated patterns. I'm sure there are some image editing tutorials around that explain the procedure to paint seamless textures in Photoshop or Paintshop Pro, for example. If you speak German, try the great tut I linked to in this posting.

93,
-Sascha.rb

Hi Yves, why, thank you. Just saw your latest lego-CAD image. Excellent lighting. How about a short tut on your dome lighting model? Might be of interest for quite a few people here. ;) Have fun, -Sascha.rb

Attached Link: http://patrix.planet3d.de/pix/SMM/SMM014.jpg

As for YL's suggestion: I made the same to e-on and I think here on renderosity, a while ago. Haven't received any feedback for some time now. I do see a problem getting a plugin renderer to work properly, mainly because Vue's own primitives are mathematic primitives and not polygon meshes. Say, a cylinder is always a "perfect" cylinder. You'd probably have to convert it into a more usual polygon mesh for most offline renderers to cope with it. Not as if that were hard to do, but, eh. we'll see.

I would really like to see the C4D R8 approach with Vue5--assembling your "own" Vue5 package according to your needs would be excellent. But I've rambled about that before, so I better just stop. ;)

ta,
-Sascha.rb

Hi JDWohlever, I stumbled over this, and a related issue, some time ago. My conclusion (mainly based on educated guesswork ;) ) was that Vue hits an internal render precision limit and hence introduces rounding errors -> colour hue shift -> pink/red. Only thing that could remedy it would be a higher precision render engine. But that's, as I mentioned, only guessing. I asked e-on about their internal precision settings before when running into a problem with very soft and very faint spotlights, but haven't received a reply, yet. We'll have to wait and see. ta, -Sascha.rb

Hi whbos, Oh, by all means: put Vue on your resume. You can't have enough "software experience" on it. I even have "working knowledge of AmigaOS, RiscOS, and BeOS" in it. ;) The more the merrier, within reason. The HR manager who'll have a look through your documents should get the impression, that you're flexible enough to work with different applications and OS. Of course, it's even better if you can include some (REALLY) good work with your resumee binder so people who've never heard of an application or another get a) an idea what you actually did with it and b) can somewhat gauge your "talents." ta, -Sascha.rb

It really depends on how you define "getting a job," i.e. working professionally. If you're self-employed and/or working as a freelancer, delivering the final product, the software you use will be largely unimportant. If you're employed with a studio and supposed to work in a team or inside a 3D workflow, Vue won't really help much--you'll have the basic skills people are looking for, but they also want people to already know the render applications the company uses day-in-day-out by heart. And in a 3D workflow, you'll almost never find Vue simply because it doesn't export anything but terrains into other 3D applications. ta, -Sascha.rb

Hi surveyman, Vue will need the memory (RAM) for both surfaces, but only the top-most surface will be rendered (i.e. will eat up rendering time)--unless, of course, it is transparent. ta, -Sascha.rb

You're welcome (the nolight-scene). :) OK, tried it out--weird indeed, but very nice rig. :D Turning up the brightness fixed it, though. Which makes me speculate: It might be that you're hitting some render precision threshold with your 104 dim light sources. I experienced a similar problem when trying to shade a scene with very dim light sources--colour banding, and with additional lights, colour cancellation and augmentation occured. Adding softness spread the "colour error" so far that it tinted the scene itself. Might be much the same here--there's so many "dark" lights illuminating the scene, that it's probable that you're hitting an internal precision limit of Vue's . . . well, I'm looking forward to the reply by e-on, until then it's just guesswork. Regarding softness: a value of 45 is very, very high and will take a long time to render at a decent quality setting as proposed in my first post here. Hence, the graininess. You'll only get rid of it (but not completely) by using an excess amount of anti-aliasing. With 104 soft shadows, rendering will take ages, I'd guess. I did a trial render at 320x200, and it already took a full 15 minutes--with nothing but a sphere in it. ta, -Sascha.rb

Hi HellBorn, yes--soft shadows are pretty grainy in Vue. And as those shadows "shade" your object through self-shading, the whole image may appear grainy. I'll try out your .vue file to see whether I can echo your issue. later, -Sascha.rb

Hi Orio, what drivers do you use? What operating system? What settings? ta, -Sascha.rb

Hi HellBorn, Regarding graininess of shadows with high "soft" values: you'll need a lot of supersampling to get them look smooth. Final is not enough. You'll need to crank up the anti-aliasing settings to about 12 subrays per pixel, and at least 75% quality threshold. Most images, though, look better with full quality threshold (i.e. "best") even with less subrays to save some render time. For digital images (i.e. web), I usually render at "best" quality threshold and 9 subrays per pixel, but at a higher resolution that is needed. Rescale the image in your image application, and you should get quite nice soft shadowing. Hope this helps, -Sascha.rb