Attached Link: http://www.geocities.com/expletivedeleteduk

I have to admit that I've been brought down a bit recently by people complaining about what they can't do with Vue, but I've just remembered an old English saying "it is a bad workman who blames his tools" and I'd guess that phrase is sufficiently a truism to exist in most cultures.

The attached link shows my attempt to do the best I can with the tools that I have, and one an a half hours to spare. Not exactly great animation but what if I'd had ten or twelve hours to put into it?

Anyway, hope casual Don as a balrog gives a laugh to a few people.

John

-Very- nice! And I can sympathize; the same thing has been going on in Poserland...where most seem to forget that the fun has been finding ways to do what was never intended.... ;)

Amazing for 1.5 hours work! How did you do the particles? I totaly sympathize as well. Bashing products is pointless. Thanks for sticking in; please don't leave this place like so many others...

I guess I'm probably a bit odd in knowing not just what I want to do, but also exactly how I'm going to do it, before I start. Maybe that makes me quicker than most?

The majority of the time was spent trying to make the rocks fall like they were big and heavy, not very successfully I'm afraid!

The particles were stuck on afterwards using Satish Kumar's Wax compositor/FX generator available HERE for free. Unfortunately Wax has a couple of Major bugs ATM, but Satish is promising a fix during the next few days and he has a good track record, so it's well worth giving it a try if you're interested.

And, no I'm not going to leave, at least until I get banned :)

John

Very dark videos with no details seems to be the vue stamp. They are interesting clips but I'd add more detail and light. I think e-on has misled their customers and that is why so many complain and are censored. I don't want to get into how they did it but the smart customers have noticed. BTW Vue4pro still does not support full poser 5 scenes but yet in its e-on press release they say they do. This sort of thing has been going on for a long time with dynamic hair, clothes, and now png's. Should customers be work free beta testers? You decide. I own Vue4pro and I am a free working beta tester for Vue4pro but was never hired I only bought the software.
Alot of complaints about the lack of plants for Vue have brought on some new free plants. Ask or complain and you may receive.

bonnyclump; The majority of Vue video available on the web is Phoul's output, and that covers a huge range of tones, it is not all "very dark". As far as my clips go; I really don't know why I made the first so dark, it was a first try with dynamic hair and clothes - both of which worked fine BTW, so I don't understand your suggestion that they don't - and that happened to be the atmosphere that loaded when I hit the new file button. My second clip was my first play with another new toy, particle system fire FX, and that just wouldn't work dramatically if it wasn't dark. As to the level of detail; the real world contains an infinite amount of detail, so anyone making a completely computer generated animation, from George Lucas down to me, has to make a decisions about how much detail to include. We none of us have an infinite amout of time available, for setup or render. That said, yes my clips are very short on detail, but ATM I've just one slow laptop to render on, so I don't really have too much choice on detail, if I want to see the output in my lifetime. Trying to edit this down from the 2000+ word response I just wrote, consider this: it's not so long since the makers of Terminator paid Silicon Graphics most of their movie budget to program a scene where a model of Arnie changes from a normal texture map to a chrome environment map, and then spend days rendering it on SGi stations. If you have the Artist Formerly Known as Poser 4 and Vue d'Esprit 4.2 running on a Celeron then you have the power to reproduce that sequence pretty convincinly in a couple of hours, if you want to try. What you can do with this software is limited by your imagination and work ethic, not by how many free trees you can get. Yes it's got bugs, as has MS Office and, probably, the WETA Workshop and ILM engines - though I don't have the millions neccesary to find out about those - I can, and do, complain to e-on and CL tech support about things that don't work. Mainly though I try to have fun with the areas that do work, and to learn from my experiments. John

"...not so long since the makers of Terminator paid Silicon Graphics most of their movie budget to program a scene where a model of Arnie changes from a normal texture map to a chrome environment map, and then spend days rendering it on SGi stations."

John, sorry but ... not so long ago?? That was nearly 15 years ago! That's a decade and 1/2 for pete's sake. In other words, an eternity in computer evolution terms. ;-)

The lag is usually 3-5 years realistically, and even faster in the video editing world (unfortunately -- effects are yesterday's news by the time they become affordable for video enthusiasts, but fortunately a lot of clients still want/like them!)

-Tim

Hey, Great work John. Thanks for sharing. You are well articulate visually and verbally.

I finally got to look at the animation, John ... I don't have DivX installed on my laptop. Anyway, great work. Nice job with the lighting aspects of the composition. Thanks for doing the gun model as well, good work. I'd like to put in a request for a Steyr Aug. I think they are another of the more intersting looking guns around. Any interest? Or do you know of anyone that has done one? Best, Tim

Just Googled up some images of the Steyr, certainly is an unusual looking thing. I've not seen one around so I'll have a go at it.

John

I'm pretty sure "Carl" is using one in Die Hard. Although, I fell in love with Aug in one of the myriad tactical shooters I've played. It was probably Rainbow Six, but could have been Delta or some other first. I jut can;t remember. But anyway, great! Glad to here it. Let me know if I can help in any way. -Tim