I HATE the new material editor and it's layers...how can I apply eco plants the "old fashioned way" if I can't find the material..and when the plant SEEMS to be there, "eco-ed on" it simply is NOT...I paint it, I apply the old way, I use vue 6's materials...I use it's own plants... ONE time I managed a "reed" in one place after populating and it said there were a lot... I tried painting and managed reeds so big my camera was covered up, I wish the darn thing HAD the QUICK START TUTORIAL... 

I am going back to vue 5, period. till the vue 6 is "real"...I have dyslexia so that with a new interface in the material room and the bugs that I don't even know about....well... not worth the stress level... all I can console myself with is that I am a registered owner and will eventually get a full working version. I KNOW it is half ME and my brain....but the other half IS vue 6 BETA... 

FYI - I used a neat 'bitmap' material that CAME WITH IT and wonder if a bitmap on a terrain will not TAKE plants?? but anyway...without PICTURES and step by step I just can't "get" the paint tool... sigh...

I DID make some nice clouds... got a good atmosphere... but the other thing is the SLUGGISH way it handels ONE poser figure too.... so something is not right...

Okay... I am off to TRY to do the "same" scene in vue 5 and reasure myself that I am still a "vue-er"!!

Lyne

Hang in there Lyne!   I'm sure once the final release is done there will be a quick start - BUT, it most likely won't cover any of the eco stuff...  There is a new book out on Vue 6 and a training DVD by AsileFX.  I can recommend the DVD - it really covers the new features well. The book is on it's way so I will let you know what I think of it. 

Now tell me what is the difference to the "old" way of doing ecosystems? (Screenshot)

You add the items into the list, you have the underlying material button to the right - what is really different? I think 'I do not get it where the problem lies. But probably I miss something relevant here.

Regarding the size of painted eco items - this has to do with two things.

#1 it happens when you clicked on "airpbrush style"

and

#2 when you try to paint items with a density that would go over 100%. Especially when "Limit density" is switched on as well. Then Vue tries to follow your wishes by making the items bigger - to fill more space with them.

Lyne, of course, you can populate the old Vue5 way, and it is done exactly the same way, in the material editor, you check the ecosystem button, and then you have the general, density, etc etc tabs. If it doesn't populate, there are 2 reasons that come to my mind:

• you have foreign objects in the scene and your "decay near foreign objects" is too strong ( it 5% by default), so change this value or make foreign objects eco friendly by clicking the tiny plant icon under their material preview in the object manager.
• the terrain you want to populate on is too small, or the plants too big. Since Vue6 works in real world measurements, this is something that can happen more often than it used to. Check the size of your plants/terrains in the object manager, and either enlarge the terrain, or change the size of instances in the general tab of the ecosystem material. You can also change size of instances in the "scaling & orientation"tab of te ecosystem material.
  Now about ecopainting, you'll notice that the size of instances is 1.000 by default and it is way too big most of the times. You should reduce this value to 0.500 and see if it is better. If not, clear the population and change the value again before painting.
  Don't give up on 6, Lyne, it may take a while, but you're gonna love it.

Attached Link: http://www.lynescreations.com/silentsyn1.htm

Hi everybody!  I appreciate your encouragement for my use of view six and the ecosystems, but please-please keep in mind that I really am dyslexic for one thing and for another the subtle differences in the way that the program works even in the "old-fashioned way of applying ecosystems" can cause my brain confusion.

I'll give you an example or two: driving in the car down the road one day the wind was blowing my hair in my face and I said strongly to my husband "please open the window"!... of course he understood to close the window.

And my original example from when I was really small-my mother tied a red ribbon around my right wrist to try to help me remember right from left, and I still can't get it "right"!  :-)

When trying to figure out the relationship of the size of the terrain and the size of the plant-two things: I've actually tried all the variations of increasing the size of the plant, decreasing the size of the plant, increasing and decreasing all the other sliders and the thing that happens most often especially with small plants and grass is that they do not appear on the surface of the terrain at all!  And that is doing it the old fashion "Vue five" way.

I take it there is something strange about the way that eco-painting works when you're using "airbrush"...  But I'm not sure where even the regular brush is - again keeping in mind that what my eyes see in front of me on the screen is not always what gets into the brain!

I am considering the DVDs but right now view six is making me go back and appreciate Vue five much more because I finally learned how and where things are.

One of the strangest things is that I guess in Vue six the world is supposed to be "real world size"?  When I look at the top view window (upper left of the four screen view) the graph squares of the ground plane are very very tiny and the camera is barely visible in the sun is nowhere to be seen initially.  Now I have changed nothing on my computer and yet when I opened Vue five the ground plane squares are large, the camera is easily found and in fact pointing in a different direction than in Vue six, and in fact when you click to add a terrain it lands in front of the camera whereas in Vue six it's off to the side in the camera seems to be pointing in an odd direction.  These may seem like simple things to you, but to me they are disorienting.  I often work in close up scenes and I feel lost and rather like I am in a plane so far above the surface of the land that everything appears very tiny.

I did create a new "start scene" for Vue six where I have reset the position of things as well as getting the camera disconnected from the sun-there's that dyslexia, I mean disconnecting the sun from the camera so that it does not point to it.

I don't think I'm giving up... I'm just waiting until my stress level and some of the bugs are work out. I'm not the world's best landscapes scene creator in the first place and to me at this point Vue five seems simple and user-friendly and I can relax with it.

Because view is my favorite program and because you are all my friends I will share something that I just put up on my personal web site that may also explain why "the smallest things" can cause me stress... and that is because my everyday life itself is quite a coping situation, where I need to do the things that are easiest and most relaxing for me when it comes to art-which is my heart and soul of my happiness. (What you'll read is also why I've had to give up creating new original models and textures for my online store-the store is still going great but I just cannot do any new creations for it)

I will attach a link to a page that may make what I'm talking about more clear for you all and ask simply for some gentle understanding.  As I said I'm not giving up and I am glad that I bought Vue six because eventually I assume that it will become as "easy" for me to use as Vue five.

And by the way I honestly don't know if there's something about my RAM-or whether it is Vue six and a bug in it, but when I import a poser figure, a large complex one like a human or a horse- moving and positioning the poser object is absolutely painstaking.  I am already in wire frame with OpenGL turned off and just moving the figure a little bit takes forever as though the program is suddenly overburdened and sluggish.  When I import the same figure into Vue five I can grab it with the cursor mouse and move it quickly and easily in any direction with any tool that I like.  I do know that the RAM in my machine is 2 GB but that it is not quite compatible with my board, and perhaps that made no difference with Vue five but Vue six is more sensitive to this?  Because of my memory (from a health issues) I can't remember the words to describe the RAM issue.  I can't afford to get a complete new two gigs of RAM at this time but I do hope to within the coming months sometime.

What you'll read at the link is why Turtle made a beautiful image of a rather sad lady and my Travis CAT and the words that she put with that picture...  I told her it was okay to say what she did because I have just recently learned that "going public with complete honesty" is a very healing thing... it is helped me be honest with myself!  Instead of being angry and fighting against my health issues I have begun to accept them-which leads to more peace of mind. However at the moment it is the weekend and my breathing machine-called a nebulizer-one of the parts of it broke, and then I found out that the medical supply place that has my prescription for the machine (you can't get these machines/parts without a prescription here in the United States) has gone out of business!  So now on Monday I must find a locally placed medical supply store that supports my particular machine and then get my doctor to issue an urgent prescription to that supply place so that I can replace a part on my nebulizer, and keep my lungs clear (it's an asthma like thing-it's explained on my web page at the bottom)

Anyway this is very stressful to me because if my lungs become congested it's very difficult to deal with the possibility of secondary infections.

Well I hope I haven't overwhelmed anybody, this just is the reality of my life and why the little old, ...er.. new Vue interface and tools can be just a little much for me.

Actually I'm quite proud of the progress I've made at my age in changing my perspective and attitude about my life situation!  :-)

I have asthma too.  I use to cough all the time - doctors tried all kinds of medicine on me, but the only stuff that worked would knock me out - great for night, but not so hot for the day.  Lost of lot of computer time because of it.  I started taking allgery shots 2 years ago.  I was cough free for over a year.  Then my doctor gave me a prescription to lower my blood-pressure.  This triggered a three month long asthma attack - I just finally stopped coughing before Christmas.  I know what you mean by not needing any additional stress!

Take it a step at a time - no hurry, no stress.  I find it easier to learn a new program if I am not trying to complete a project or picture, but just playing around. 

I also have problems knowing my left from my right, always takes me a moment before I can say right or left. When in a car, I always say "this way", while showing the way, because so many times I said right when I meant left!

Now about Vue6: "The sun is nowhere to be seen initially"; yes, Lyne, this is true with spectral atmospheres, and I suppose that it's needed this way to accuratly match the real world atmospheric effects that spectral atmospheres recreate. You need to click the sun in the world browser and then zoom out to see where the sun is coming from. But you already fugured that one out, I'm sure.
Poser import: Vue6 now lets you repose your figures inside Vue, and can import Poser shaders, using these two options will slow down a lot working in the scene, so if you don't intend to repose your figure and if you just use the texture maps that figures generally come wth, I suggest you don't use these options, then you'll be able to work as in Vue5. If it is still not enough, you can uncheck " enable background draw thread". This option is found in the main menu, under: File, Options, Display options, 3D view display quality.

Vue6 has many more options than previous version, and works a bit differently too, so it's not easy for anyone to get around it in a few weeks, so you're not alone here! And we are all here to help each other. There are no stupid questions!

Thank you for your reasurances.... and I do have the background draw turned off.... and I never (yet) let it stay hooked up to P6 for posing etc...know there are bugs there....  ah...sun..spectral thingys...(those clouds look SO NEAT!!)... I MIGHT wander in there...and PLAY as Peggy suggested...when some other stresses calm down.. :)

Lyne, You said your Vue 6 was very slow. Are using a mac and Panther (OS 10.3.9) because I could not use Vue 6 at all and then I contacted eon and they said the original Vue 6 build was incompatable but the update fixed all of that. If you are not on a mac then it also might be an issue of ram. How much ram do you have and what is the MHZ or Speed of the computer? I am sorry to hear you are having so many problems with Vue 6 due to your health issues. You obviously have had a lot more to overcome to learn Vue 5 and now 6 so you are to be comeneded for sticking it out. Hang in there and take it slow and you will learn it. LMcLean