One of the things that sold V5i to me was the ability to reload a Poser figure while keeping the Vue texturing. I've now tried this out and there seem to be two problems with it, one of them serious. Problem 1: I load a Poser figure, modify the materials, then change the pose in Poser and save again. Vue picks up that the figure has changed and offers to reload it. However, for EVERY material that I have changed, up comes a dialog box asking whether I want to keep the modified material. Since there may well be 10-15 modified materials, this gets old quickly. Surely there must be a way to set it that the materials set in Vue are never to be overwritten by the original Poser ones and the import is to be seamless? Problem 2: I load a Poser figure and modify the materials. I want one complex material to be used by several of the material zones. Of course, as usual Vue destroys a material zone every time I copy and paste a material. Now what happens when I reload the Poser figure is that without asking, Vue resets all the original material zones and materials, and all my retexturing work is gone. The only way I can find round this is never to use copy and paste for materials and regenerate the material I want afresh for every material zone, but this is stupidly tedious. Is there a better solution?

I feel for you and have no solution. I have the problem when I collapse identical materials and then change the pose of the figure. Vue reports the change and updates without keeping the materials collapsed. My solution is to do much planning ahead.

Hope you have submitted this to e-on tech support. My experience with reporting problems is that they are grateful for such reports and will work improvements into the next patch. Ideally, such problems shouldn't happen, but pratically, the developers can't know everything that doesn't work as well as it should and the beta testers (i've been one for other products) never find everything. In the case of Vue 5i, i imagine that the beta testers were pretty distracted by the ecosystem feature and may not have been as thorough in other areas as they could have been. And beta testing time is always limited.

I have reported this. It seems to me to indicate very weak beta testing; the very first use of this important feature revealed how flaky it was. The Vue-Poser link is supposed to be a big selling point; yet it is not thought through, and one gets the impression that whoever WROTE the software never actually USED it. Part of the problem (as I have reported to e-on) is that the distinction is overlooked between a material (set of parameters) and a material zone (where those parameters apply). The absence of this distinction leads to a number of difficulties.

Happy to read that you have reported this. I discovered and reported a problem with exporting boolean objects (textures messed up), which i thought would have been found during beta tests and which was an advertised feature (exporting geometry, that is, not specifically exporting Booleans).

Let's hope for better prerelease testing in future. Must be tough to balance the desire to test thoroughly against the presures to get a new release out the door.

Message edited on: 05/08/2005 19:32

This is like that since Vue 4 Pro. I am sure there is a reason why it is not corrected yet. It was reported with 4 Pro already. I simply do the final material things only when all the posing is done in Poser so that the object is final in Vue. The best way to work around this little thing. I even then destroy the connection to Poser by ungrouping the object for example or saving the model as vob and reload that then. Otherwise you have to keep the pz3-file till the end of your days, otherwise the vue-file will not load anymore because it can't find the pz3! lanaloe77 is right. Collapse materials then it might be easier - you deal with not so many materials anymore.

One day your ship comes in - but you're at the airport.

This might be all very well in Vue d'Esprit, but Pro/Infinite comes with a much bigger price tag and is supposed to be professional level software. I therefore expect professional standards. The features that are used as a selling point ought to work properly, and if they don't, they should be fixed quickly. Imagine the howls if some major feature in Adobe Photoshop didn't work correctly on release. Adobe would have their butts hauled over the coals. wabe, I work with comics in which the same figure has to be rendered over and over again with a different pose in each panel. So I can't follow your way of doing things. I bought Infinite specifically for this feature, which would make my life a lot easier if it worked properly.

Oh well, i easily can show you some not so well working features in Photoshop. That need workarounds. This is happening in all pieces of software these days. I agree, we don't have to be too happy about, but the only thing we can do is report those things. If you work as you describe it, wouldn't it be much more effective to find material settings in Poser that work in Vue without retouching them? In your position i would do some testings to get that, even when the materials look not so good in Poser. Or prepare a library of materials in Vue so that there is only a simple and quick exchange of the materials. A thing of 1 minute i would say. Have i said, i am one of these lousy beta testers you have talked about? Be assured beta testing was a lot of work and was done as carefully as possible. But you never can avoid that there are corners in the software where nobody has looked into too closely. Let's hope that this will be fixed - if possible.

One day your ship comes in - but you're at the airport.

Oh, believe me, I have tried getting it as right as possible in Poser. This is easier with Vue 5i than 4e as the import of bump maps is much improved. The problem is with anything reflective; it comes into Vue looking like a mirror. But it is a great shame to be restricted to what can be got as the lowest common denominator that can be set up in Poser so that when brought into Vue it will look OK. One would like to use the full power of the Vue materials on one's Poser figures.