I just got Vue5I today, which wasn't bad on shipping considering Oregon to Florida is quite a ship and I only paid for Ground. So I loaded it up, copied the demo scenes from the secondary disk, updated to the latest version which was recommended in an earlier thread. There is a couple of scenes that don't seem to want to load from Vue4Pro, but seems to me they said something about that in the manual. I followed the manual on page 453 where it has the animated ocean tutorial, but just did the ecosystem part just to get a taste of it. I changed the material to ecosystem on the terrain, I loaded in palm tree and hit okay and then I rendered it, but no palm trees. Am I missing a step? The E-On logo EcoSystem on the scene samples worked okay, so EcoSystem must work. I just can't figure out what I'm missing. It has some interesting features so far, gonna take me a bunch of time to get into them though.

Am I right in thinking that tutorial involves creating an island and populating it with trees? If so, in the ecosystem material's density tab, do you have decay near foreign objects checked? You might want to try lowering the slider and/or turning the check off altogether. It could be that the island is quite small, and obviously close to the procedural ocean which is a foreign object, and therefore it's not populating the ecosystem as the decay has kicked in. Might not be that, but give it a check :)

Okay, perhaps that wasn't the best example to learn from. Here is what I did from scratch. Started a new scene, loaded one of the sunlight atmospheres, I made a 512x512 standard terrain. I changed the tab in the Advanced Editor to EcoSystem. I added in a palm tree into the EcoSystem Population. I hit okay and rendered it, but no palm trees, just the terrain. The terrain is sitting right in front of the camera. I tried rendering it in Preview, Final and Superior modes? In the material for the terrain, it shows the EcoSystem trees under the sphere for the underlying material, but it doesn't seem to be rendering them or showing them in the OpenGL preview like it does in the e-on example.

Message edited on: 03/29/2005 16:24

Did you check the "decay near foreign objects"(as above) and did you click the "populate" button?

Ah, that's the part I missed was the population button. Color me an idiot. :) Thanks...

Shadow, you're not alone. When a friend tells me they will get Infinite and be an Ecotist too soon the first thing i say is "don't forget the populate button". Because i had to learn that first as well. What maybe is good too is to use the clear button as well when you do changes on the Ecosystem - before you populate again. To be sure you have a "fresh start". Good luck with Infinite - and post soon, i am really curious what you will do with Ecos.

Thanks, I feel a bit better now. :) I am amazed at the possibilities the ecosystem opens up and I loved how well it handled on my 512Meg computer in one of the demo scenes that was something like 500 million polys and it seems very stable. I look forward to getting into it further when I get more time, which unfortunately probably won't be until the end of the week, but who knows. Sometimes I say that and I wind up sneaking into Vue anyway. It will certainly be fun experimenting with different things. Will post when I can and thanks wabe...