I am beginning to notice more and more things at   Cornucopia3D
are for Vue 7/8 owners only. As quite a few of us are stuck with various Vue 6 versions, due to the fact our pockets are empty But we may have enough spare cash to buy little nice things. And now we find we have been left behind.

This is perfectly natural and it's the same in many other tools (Poser, 3DS Max, etc, etc). If you go to other sites that sell 3D content in 3DS Max, for example, like Turbosquid and others, you'll see that all new objects are compatible only with recent versions, like 3DS Max 8 and such. New objects for sale are no longer compatible with 3DS Max 4, for example. The market pushes you to upgrade. In technology related issues in general, you can't stand still, you have to go with the flow or you stagnate and die.

Yes, Artur is right on the track - people will start utilizing features introduced in the later versions, be that Vue's EcoSystems etc., simply because they do the job better.

Not so!  (Original premise, not Rutra's reply.) Every one of my products is made for Vue 5 and upwards. Other vendors do the same, although most begin with Vue6. (I probably am one of the few still making for Vue 5.) But I plan to move to Vue 6 and upwards only within a few months. I am tired of fighting the UV mapping and texturing issues of Vue 5 - takes many extra hours to overcome those issues, and  do purchasers really care or appreciate the extra work needed? (Not likely.)

Rutra is correct in that many vendors are taking advantage of the new features in Vue 7 to accomplish things they could not otherwise do. So, their products are, indeed, Vue 7 only. 

Well again some of have limited resources, so I guess we have to suck it up, And I guess they lose some of their customer base. Some vendors Like Quicktime update at no cost as they improve their programs, but then I guess their customer base is huge.. ............

I'm afraid I don't understand your analogy with Quicktime. What are you comparing it with? Vue or the content?

I guess the analogy is simple, so I am left with Vue 6, still bug infested. Then asked to upgrade for more features which seem good. But yet again from what I have been reading, Vue 7 is not at all perfect. I worked in customer support for years, our software certainly contain a lot of bugs. We improved the software as we went along and always provided the customer with the new software for free as I admit Vue have provided a lot of fixed patches, some worked some failed. When we added new feautures they were provided as free. That always keeps the customer happy. We had the hope that when we provided new products they would be happy to buy them. Vue 7 and Vue 8 are not new products, they are just improvements on past Vue versions. Vue 6 was a giant leap from Vue 5, so at that point I did not mind forking out a little for it.I dont know about the rest of the people here but I have put a lot of money into this so far. Wondering has any one ever spoken to a VUE support person by phone? I actually live there office in the US, it's a PO box.

so you're saying that quicktime is the flagship product of apple?

im not sure i understand either.

I agree with forester, most of my products are made in Vue 5 to allow for the many people who haven't upgraded but it's now so behind on the features newer versions have that I won't be working with it for much longer. 

That said, my latest product I'm working on is Vue 7..... sorry

If I purchase objects I often prefer Poser format. It is easy to import in many other applications. Some vendors like Vanishingpoint or Dark Anvil give me that opportunity to choose between Vue and Poser format.

Mazak

Quote - "Vue 7 and Vue 8 are not new products, they are just improvements on past Vue versions."

I guess the same could be said about many other products. Is Photoshop CS4 a new product or an improvement on CS3? Is 3DS Max 8 a new product or an improvement on Max 7? etc, etc. When is the amount of new features enough to call it a new product? It's a thin line...

Quote - "so I am left with Vue 6, still bug infested."

I worked with Vue6 for 2 years (and still do whenever Vue7 is rendering) and I can't agree with this statement. Vue6 is very stable, IMO.

Quote - "Wondering has any one ever spoken to a VUE support person by phone?"

Yes, I know of at least one person who has. ArtPearl, she might jump in in this thread any minute. :-)

So, if I understand you right, you don't want to upgrade to Vue7 because the amount of new features compared with Vue6 doesn't justify it, in your opinion. I completely disagree but anyway it's your decision. But, given this decision, you must accept what comes with it, i.e, no more patches and less content. You have what you pay for... ;-)

Notice how he's ignoring our comments, gillbrooks?  

So, this thread never was about being left behind at C3D. 

Quote -
Yes, I know of at least one person who has. ArtPearl, she might jump in in this thread any minute. :-)

Well I guess if I'm expected to jump I should jump, sorry it took me more than a minute:)
Although   I'm not sure what the argument is about in this thread...

Yes, I did talk to e-on people on the phone -not a long wait on the phone and when they couldnt answer  they called back really promptly. They were very polite too. But what does that prove? Politeness shouldnt be confused with helpfulness. It doesnt make much of a difference if I submit a ticket or talk on the phone, they do what they do according to their own agenda.
I have no issues with them coming up with new versions. I have no issues with vendors selling products for the latest versions only. They can sell what the like and I'll buy what I need/like.
But I do have  a big issue with e-on moving on to a new version without having a stable previous version.
For me v6 worked beautifully and therefore I eagerly upgraded to v7. V7 still doesnt work well, so I wont be buying v8 in a hurry.
If vendor sold content for earlier versions which didnt work right and they only fixed it for the new version, I'd complain about that too, but I dont think that's happening. They'll make what sells. I buy very little content anyhow, so my opinion wouldnt count for much. I make most of what I need for my images. Perhaps the OP could consider this as an option? not only would you save money but it is a lot more fun (not for the vendors though, sorry:) )

On the other hand if Obama decides that 'cash for clankers' should be extended from useless cars to useless software...:)

I have one product at Cornucopia3D that is Vue 7 only. Schwandorf Ivy. The reason for this is that only since Vue 7 we have the option to paint ecosystems in all windows of the scene. and this is an essential feature for the product I use. To be able to apply it to vertical surfaces via painting.

Due to some people who asked I decided to make a Vue 6 version of it - a bit different and harder to use but I was convinced (by people who requested it) that it made sense.

When I now look at the figures of how many copies I have sold from the two versions I must say that the Vue 6 version is way behind the Vue 7 one.Means most people who buy content HAVE updated to generation 7. Therefore, especially when there is only limited time to create content, it makes sense for me to concentrate on those. Especially of course when there are features involved that are not available in earlier versions.

Quote - > Quote -

Yes, I know of at least one person who has. ArtPearl, she might jump in in this thread any minute. :-)

Well I guess if I'm expected to jump I should jump, sorry it took me more than a minute:)
Although   I'm not sure what the argument is about in this thread...

Yes, I did talk to e-on people on the phone -not a long wait on the phone and when they couldnt answer  they called back really promptly. They were very polite too. But what does that prove? Politeness shouldnt be confused with helpfulness. It doesnt make much of a difference if I submit a ticket or talk on the phone, they do what they do according to their own agenda.
I have no issues with them coming up with new versions. I have no issues with vendors selling products for the latest versions only. They can sell what the like and I'll buy what I need/like.
But I do have  a big issue with e-on moving on to a new version without having a stable previous version.
For me v6 worked beautifully and therefore I eagerly upgraded to v7. V7 still doesnt work well, so I wont be buying v8 in a hurry.
If vendor sold content for earlier versions which didnt work right and they only fixed it for the new version, I'd complain about that too, but I dont think that's happening. They'll make what sells. I buy very little content anyhow, so my opinion wouldnt count for much. I make most of what I need for my images. Perhaps the OP could consider this as an option? not only would you save money but it is a lot more fun (not for the vendors though, sorry:) )

On the other hand if Obama decides that 'cash for clankers' should be extended from useless cars to useless software...:)

I will agree fully with you on this. As you know, I too have been in touch with Vue support regarding at least 1 confirmed issue with Vue 7.4 regarding my "atmosphere editor" issue in the thread here. They did indeed confirm an issue once I uploaded my file to them and said "they are looking into it". However, they did not give any real details on when this will be fixed. So, in terms of support help, I have found it lacking in depth for resolving issues or proving specific answers.

If they don't start fixing some of these bugs as you have said, I think they are going to hit a wall because it will become such a mess they will have to nearly re-write all the code to correct it all. They need to make sure the code is rock solid and patch it all first before moving to newer versions. Let's just hope they will address this sooner rather than later.

Sorry I have not been ignoring the coments been busy with my boy. Vue 6 is quite stable about 80% of the time for me. But there are wierd things that happen sometimes, odd things crop up in renders that should not be there. Yes I do love the program and there was more that just the products at Cornucopia3D. I am a hobbiest not a proffesional and I believe thats where VUE are aiming at now.

Quote - But we may have enough spare cash to buy little nice things. And now we find we have been left behind.

Perhaps, but as a C3D vendor who does have product available for both 6 & 7, I will also be forced to market to V7/8 users as the render engine did change from 6 to 7.

Furthermore, If users have money to upgrade the main product, then I assume they have more available funds for purchasing add-ons.

Lastly, there are those who are unhappy with V7-- just as there were those unhappy with V6-- just as there are those unhappy with V5-- and so the story goes...

It's rather funny, it seems different users can't use the even versions, while others can't use the odd versions. I, personally, can't make much sense of it all, as lucky for me, they all seem to work on all my computers (WinXP and Vista). I did recently come back from SigGraph, where I specifically asked the president of e-on about 7.4 versus 7.5 and if there was any difference in the code base (other than the newly added features) and he replied that no, both versions are compiled from the latest 7.5 codebase.

Here's another interesting point he made regarding polygon count and importing objects. It can take upwards of 10 times the amount of memory to handle polygon meshes versus a height field terrain. So, importing a million polygon model, can chew up some serious memory!

Sadly, for Mac users, without a 64-bit version of Vue (or Max, or Maya, or Modo, or SketchUp, or Lightwave, etc..), memory restrictions play a huge part in not being able to create complex scenes in many of the 3D suites (Cinema 4D  is the only one I know of which already is Cocoa compiled for Mac 64-bit). Because Apple forces developers to use their tools, those with optimized cross-platform development environments find it more difficult to cross-compile for Macs...something Apple will probably have to find a way around-- or lose the high-end 3D crowd.

I normally create my stuff for Vue6 and up, but some products make use of new V7 features (spectral2 clouds for example are Vue7 only). I wanted my last product (egyptian columns) to be Vue6 compatible, and I had to create texture maps out of Vue7 fractals for this, which is a tad stupid, but the new fractals are so much better in V7. So it is sometimes hard and clumsy to create content for Vue6 when Vue7 adds improvements and allow to create better stuff for the store.

Time for some light humour http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_rhiibMG6w

Also I can imagine talking to them in person abd chewing their ears off for such a product that has so many flaws (VUE 6) on it's release, obviously not fully tested. Imagine Adobe doing that?

well truth be told, adobes latest products are about 30 times slower than their older products, despite the fact that computers have increased in speed dramatically.

They stiill work, PS has never crashed my computer and the results are always good

I just did a test on an Adobe function, it was not slower, but about 4 times faster.

Vue never crashed my computer either and results are always good also.

If you browse Vue forums, you'll quickly arrive to the conclusion that some people have lots of problems and other people have very few problems (like my case). So, Vue, by itself, seems capable of running with very few issues, as the latter cases show.

The problem seems to lie in the combination between Vue and some software and/or hardware. People have a tendency to say something like "other products runs well in my computer, so the problem must lie in Vue". In my opinion, that's jumping to conclusions. Other products may not use a certain feature or characteristic of, for example, the graphic card or the operating system or drivers, which may not be running well in some systems. Or some incompatibility with some anti-virus or anti-spyware, or whatever. So, the fact that other products runs well in your system, doesn't mean that your system is perfect. It could just mean that these products don't use the parts of your system that Vue uses.

I already ran 4 or 5 versions of Vue in 3 different computers and never had any significant problems in any of these combinations. I do have certain patterns of behavior when it comes to computers. For example, I always disable all widgets and fancy stuff of the operating system, stripping it down to the simplest possible (I don't even have screensavers). I do clean my system regularly (registry clean, checkdisks, etc). I choose my anti-virus carefully (not heavy stuff, like Norton). I disable all non-essential system services. Etc. etc. 

Aside from compatibility with models being produced, I'm starting to think that e-on is abandoning even fixing 7.4 as my last couple support requests were answered with 'we are unable to replicate the issue, reinstall the program.' Mind you I've reinstalled TEN times now on just the one machine... yes, I've been keeping track. :cursing:  I'm guessing a good 5 or 6 reinstalls on my other machines, all of which are Macs and of differing hardware makeups.

While I'm on the topic, I should mention that I installed the 7.5 Infinite PLE the other night and it runs beautifully on both My Mac Pro and my MacBook Pro. Two things I noticed straight away were that the flaky display problems are gone and the keyboard inputs appear to work accurately - two major things that have kept me from really using 7.4. That said, I really can't beleive that they are compiled from the same codebase the performance is night and day between the two... and here I thought I had gotten over feeling shafted by e-on.

BTW, Vue 6 Infinite has always and still is rock solid on all of my Macs, so no complaints there!

By 'keyboard inputs appear to work accurately' you mean no more dyslexia? digits/characters are actually appearing in the same order they are typed in? even if you type faster than one character every 5 seconds?  After all the moaning of e-on and its Greek chorus of 'yeh' sayers how  it isnt a problem, and if it was it would be impossible to fix, and why are you using a mac anyhow?
And yet it isnt fixed for 7.4? this requires some inquiries... but if this is so, how much closer can you get to cheating customers?
Wow. Mind boggling.

Quote - After all the moaning of e-on and its Greek chorus of 'yeh' sayers how  it isnt a problem, and if it was it would be impossible to fix, and why are you using a mac anyhow?

It's one thing for you to continually attack e-on regarding your personal experiences...

It's a whole different thing to attack us as a "Greek chorus of 'yeh' sayers" just because we don't have your same problems.

ArtPearl-- perhaps you're having a problem grasping the fact there are some of us who don't share in your disatisfaction regarding Vue. That is our reality-- obviously different from yours. It's not necessary to call us names because we don't share in your misery.

Quote - By 'keyboard inputs appear to work accurately' you mean no more dyslexia?

Well after actually trying to build a scene, it appears that the problem does still exist, though it seems to be less frequent - I switched over to 7.4 for a minute to make sure it wasn't just me and it does indeed appear to be a little better in 7.5. In my first go with 7.5 I was specifically testing things out and may have subconsciously typed a little slower. Regardless, it's hard to accurately test something like this since there's so much room for human error/correction.

The display issue does appear to be fixed though and is illustrated in the screengrabs below. This is a simple test scene created in Vue 6 Infinite with a single Poser model to show the issue at hand. From top to bottom is version 6, 7.4, 7.5 and as you can see, 7.4 looks like a messy wireframe view, yet all three are set to 'smooth shaded' display. This is what I get with all objects in 7.4, save for a few simple primitives, so one can see why I'm unable to do anything other than open Vue 6 files and hit render as adding more than an object or two and you can't make heads or tails of the scene contents :(  Fresh screenshots in hand, I'll be reporting this one to e-on again this evening.

Ahh.

The openGL redraw issue. Some of the issue is in Vue, true enough. Some resides in your video card (ATI, by any chance, who is famed far and wide for their crappy OpenGL implementation and drivers?), and some in the actual OpenGL installed software in your OS. The =most common= reason for this particular issue (and Vue is hardly the only app that has demonstrated it) is lack of standards compatibility. OpenGL was hands down king of cross compatibility......up until Shader standards were attached. Then it could get as flaky as Direct X, as you could have a vanilla OpenGL implementation, an app that was trying to force Shader 1.1 through the pipe to a card that supported Shader 2 or 2.5 with customized tricks to speed up game state display commands. That particular model also has more polygons in it than some -levels- in Doom 3 (wanna see? Take a look at the naked geometry; most of what you see is texturing, lighting, and normal mapping. Level geometry is minimal), and openGL has buffer limitations, just as it has light limitations (how many depends on which version of OpenGL you have implemented).

I'm with Rutra and Chipp; all my experience is that a lot of the issues people have could be traced to poor system configuration. And remember, =Every time you install an application, no matter how minimal, it changes your configuration=.  And there is also the matter of installation -order-; that can be more important than anything.

For example: the older geeks may remember the firestorm of complaints when AMD fielded the K6-2 chip. All the howling about instability, this issue, that issue.....none of which I ever had. And the reason I never had it is I was logical about installing the motherboard drivers of the day. AGP was new then, and a lot of vendors was forcing the AGP drivers in first.....and that broke the whole magilla. Being the cautious type, I never allowed things to install themselves; it was manual all the way, so I bloody well knew what was going on. All it took to 'cure' all those issues was to install the actual northbridge driver first, reboot, then the IDE driver, reboot, and -then- the AGP driver.....as that video driver depended on the other two for proper function, and you needed the reboot to have those just installed drivers properly initialized and set up in the registry.

Another example: A friend of a friend was having fits with his machine. It was randomly BSODing with no consistent trigger event. After more reinstalls over the phone and assurances he was following instructions, I finally was on a visit and got to -watch-. The issue turned out to be a game; one those Popcap type games. Near as I could determine, the little bugger was grabbing on to a couple of ActiveX stubs and not releasing them. And if anything made those calls or tried to get at the memory that one set of flags claimed was clear, but another set said was in use and not free......
boom.

Notice he never told me about the game. That is the kind of thing people do all the time, it bites them, but as it 'couldn't' be the issue, they never bother to check it. I'd be willing to wager that a lot of the folks who do the reinstall polka -return their systems to the exact same state as before- and then test things, instead of doing the base OS install, then the app in question and testing that first. Then if things work right, start adding apps and codecs one at a time until things don't. Computers are not, and never will be, simple 'appliances' (at least an honest to God computer, not some device with a process controller in it), and you have to respect them as the most flexible, powerful tool ever created. 

JCD
dumb question but...
have you turned OFF "Limit open gl polygons"? :)

I would agree it was maybe a hardware problem, not enough memory. 2 gigs of ram got eaten up very quickly. But reasoning the crashes with VUE, nothing else crashed my computer so one concludes that VUE was doing it. I built a new machine with 7 GIGS took me a while just to get the thing working good and yes VUR works well and does not crash.
SO back to upgrades, so they want $400 and then a Maintenance program so you can report bugs(yes I know it offers other things) that is ridiculous. Most things you buy come with a warranty and if the product is faulty you return it, is there something I am missing or just being stupid?

Quote - "But reasoning the crashes with VUE, nothing else crashed my computer so one concludes that VUE was doing it."

I guess you either didn't read my previous post and the one of Dale B or you don't agree with us... ;-)

That sentence of yours is so jumping to conclusions that your next sentence totally contradicts your 1st conclusion: You wrote next: "I built a new machine with 7 GIGS took me a while just to get the thing working good and yes VUR works well and does not crash. "

So, the problem was never in Vue, was it? If you replaced the hardware and the problems with Vue stopped, the original problem was obviously not in Vue.

Quote - "so they want $400 and then a Maintenance program so you can report bugs(yes I know it offers other things) that is ridiculous."

You are wrong. Even without maintenance plan you can report bugs.

Well you could say the problem was not with VUE, but the hardware? not really 100% correct, yes it sometimes warned out of memory, other time it went down without any warning, Lucky I save on a regular basis. Yes you can report bugs and complain at them. Sometimes you will get a speady reply sometime you get a reply a few days later, and if you questioned something like pricing, the message back would be we have passed youe message along to blah blah.

Quote - "Well you could say the problem was not with VUE, but the hardware? not really 100% correct, yes it sometimes warned out of memory, other time it went down without any warning,"

What's your point? If there's no warning it can't be the hardware? You gotta be joking... :-)

Quote - "Yes you can report bugs and complain at them. Sometimes you will get a speady reply sometime you get a reply a few days later, and if you questioned something like pricing, the message back would be we have passed youe message along to blah blah."

What's your point? Would you like a faster response? Do you think that if you had a maintenance plan they wouldn't have to pass the message to someone else for clarification? Sorry, I really don't get your point.

The point is A) let's cover customer support, as I said earlier I was in customer support. Not only did I have to answer within one hour but I also had to come up with a solution within 24 hours or be on a plane the next day. So my point is poor understanding of the American market.

B) A good programer would always be doing a memory check just to ensure that the hardware was capable of doing what the software required was asking of it.

Computers are a synergy of hardware and software. If the same mesh import gave those two differing results, depending on apparent phase of the moon and butterfly somewhere in the world flapping its wings, the first thing I would have recommended is a serious test of your memory modules. All it takes is one weak transistor...and as long as app A, C, and F doesn't address it, they will work like everything is perfect....until app B tries, crashes, and burns. Then it 'obviously' app B that is at fault (and yes, there have been one or two who seemed to feel that e-on should somehow ensure that their software works on the dying hardware they own).

Debugging software is not for the faint hearted. The actual cause of an issue can be so far removed from what it 'should' be it isn't even funny. Best example of that was when I was in tech school. We had a PDP-11, and they were trying to run a simulation for a state department (being a state tech school, it was no trouble and would be good experience, etc). The sim would only get about a third of the way through and the whole bloody system crashed.....and on something like and 11, that was no minor reboot issue. They spent nearly 2 weeks combing the sim software for mistakes. Nada. Reload, retry, crasharooni. They spent 4 days on system diagnostics. Nothing. Again. Again crash. They paid their tech firm for almost 3 weeks of backtracing the physical circuits, because that was the only thing left. Nothing. Then someone noticed a display flicker, like the dumb terminal was being interrupted. It proved out to be the card reader for the system. It was one of the 'new' optical card readers, and it had what could be kindly called an aggressive interrupt scheme. It was constantly pinging the main system to see if it were needed....and the crash occured when the reader interrupt hit at the same time the program did a soft interrupt to initialize a subroutine. They turned off the reader, and the sim ran just fine. I've seen poorly written mouse drivers shut down video cards, joystick interfaces grab the interrupt for the hard drive controller, bringing the system to the digital equivalent of a frontal lobotomy, sound cards blocking the function of floppy drives, etc. It's rarely simple to trace and fix a problem........never mind doing it without breaking something else....

Yeah I had a mouse fail, it would open mutiple windows. At first I thought I had been hacked, and I talked with an online forum. After running mutiple spyware, virus and and system check programs we came up with nothing. Just by chance I unplugged that mouse one day and tried another one, yep that was the solution. Omg PDP11 I remember using one of them. Where's my Amiga 4000!

Quote - "let's cover customer support, as I said earlier I was in customer support. Not only did I have to answer within one hour but I also had to come up with a solution within 24 hours or be on a plane the next day. So my point is poor understanding of the American market."

The response from a company to its customers depend to a great extent if you are a good or a bad customer. I'm sure you'll agree with me that a bad customer should get less focus, so that more focus can be given to good customers. You are a bad customer: you don't have a maintenance plan and the last thing you bought was Vue6. Surely you don't want the same attention from e-on as a big movie studio gets, do you? Do you, being the customer that you are, honestly demand a 1 hour response from e-on? Again, you gotta be joking... :-)

Quote - "A good programer would always be doing a memory check just to ensure that the hardware was capable of doing what the software required was asking of it."

Not even the finest of programmers can predict all the possible situations and all the very poor configurations around. I could agree with you if you said that Vue does seem to have a share of bugs higher than the market average. But still that's not a reason for you to, by default, throw all the problems back to Vue. If there's a hickup, that's Vue fault. Come on...

Quote - "Yeah I had a mouse fail, it would open mutiple windows. At first I thought I had been hacked, and I talked with an online forum. After running mutiple spyware, virus and and system check programs we came up with nothing. Just by chance I unplugged that mouse one day and tried another one, yep that was the solution."

I'm almost sure that, for a moment, it did cross your mind that the mouse's fault was caused by Vue... ;-)

A maintenance prgram is usualy sold to older products out of warranty so yes that is me, newer products are usualy covered by warranty. As for being a bad customer, gee I brought over $1000 of VUE products. Sorry not a major movie company here, but I do have a video with 1,000,000 hits on Youtube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2O5xyykbJs

this one has had 350000 in two days.

Nah was noty running Vue at the time, that was when 6 was was newly out and well we all knew about that, I was pleased when finaly they came up with the fixes.

Quote - "A maintenance prgram is usualy sold to older products out of warranty"

I'm sorry, but that's completely untrue. In my job, I have to buy lots of software and I know a bit about this.

Quote - "As for being a bad customer, gee I brought over $1000 of VUE products."

So what? Your last purchase was a long time ago and, anyway, $1000 is nothing, compared with others.

Quote - "but I do have a video with 1,000,000 hits on Youtube"

Sorry, but I fail to see how that is relevant for the discussion at hand or for e-on.

The last point is if a 1,000,000 people see something, I get questions, like(so CA) what program did you use to do that? Surely that is advertizing for the program you are using?

A $1000 is nothing? I would like see how many others here think that is nothing.

so do you want advertising revenue?

1000 dollars is a lot, but a lot of other people have spent a lot more a lot more recently.

Nope I just pass on the info to people the program I am using.

Hi Chip,

You said:

"Sadly, for Mac users, without a 64-bit version of Vue (or Max, or Maya, or Modo, or SketchUp, or Lightwave, etc..), memory restrictions play a huge part in not being able to create complex scenes in many of the 3D suites (Cinema 4D  is the only one I know of which already is Cocoa compiled for Mac 64-bit). Because Apple forces developers to use their tools, those with optimized cross-platform development environments find it more difficult to cross-compile for Macs...something Apple will probably have to find a way around-- or lose the high-end 3D crowd."

I wanted to add a few things to that as well.

First, Vue has NEVER crashed my system. The software has crashed just a few times itself, but rarely. Second, the problems with Vue 7.4 I have had was documented and confirmed by e-on for at least 1 item I reported. It was an issue with both Mac and PC versions, but less pronounced in Vue 64bit under Windows. It may be the same code base, but as you know the code is not exactly the same from the Mac and PC versions so there may be some bugs and other issues they need to work on not in the PC version.

While I know what you mean about Vue not being the only software that works better in 64 bit, at least 3 of them have said the Mac is CONFIRMED to get 64 bit support soon. Adobe had a press release about Photoshop CS5 now in development being fully re-written in Cocoa and Modo has said they are working on Modo 4.x in 64 bit and will give it for free to anyone that buys a license now. Also, Autodesk has said that 64 bit is coming for Maya and Mudbox but not given specifics like Modo and Photoshop have said in their official statements. So, Mac will catch up to the Windows platform given the popularity of Mac now.

Also, keep in mind that many companies are now offering a cross-platform license for their software like Modo and even Vue. That means it does not matter if you run Mac OS or Windows OS and you can take advantage of each like I do. I have Windows 7 RC installed now on a dedicated hard drive all by itself in my Mac Pro. It gives me the best of both worlds because I simply choose which drive I want to boot from at startup and work in that OS. Works perfect and for those LARGE Vue files as you mention, I just use a USB key to save my required Vue files and boot into my Windows OS.

Companies like e-on should have been and need to code for Mac using Cocoa just like C4D does. I think the rub for a lot is that for programs that cost over $1,000 there should be better support given other companies do it now (or made an official statement) and do it better (i.e. C4D). It's not just Vue, but ZBrush has been well documented in 3D World and other places about their lack of support and the PR issues they have.

For me, Vue has been stable, but it does have it's share of bugs that seem more pronounced in the Mac version. But since I duel-boot anyway, it really is not a big issue despite the fact I think e-on needs to get better support overall for their customers that own their software regardless.

Have a good weekend, hope things are going well.

Quote - "A $1000 is nothing? I would like see how many others here think that is nothing."

Please don't quote me out of context. My full sentence was "$1000 is nothing, compared with others."
Rich_Potter understood it.

Quote - "The last point is if a 1,000,000 people see something, I get questions, like(so CA) what program did you use to do that? Surely that is advertizing for the program you are using?"

Many of us contribute with advertizing for the company. For example, ever noticed the box cover of Vue 7 Esprit? The figure that has been in the front page of e-on's site for months, with the slogan "we have a vue for you"? That figure, a woman reaching for the sky, was an original image of mine (you can see it here: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1746289)

Another example: have you seen the image used to advertise Vue 7 Pioneer (and that is also in the box cover)? That's also an image of mine, here: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1741954).

E-on has used many of my images for many things. Do you think I ever got anything out of it? Nothing! Not even my name credited for it. Do I care? No, I wish they have a great business! The more they sell, the more they can do about Vue and so the more I benefit from it.

Quote - JCD
dumb question but...
have you turned OFF "Limit open gl polygons"? :)

Yup, I've gone through all of the display settings and nothing makes a difference on this... I wish it was just that though.

As for my hardware configuration, my main machine (and the one the grabs are from) is a Mac Pro 2x 3.0GHz Dual-Core Xeon,16GB RAM, ATI Radeon X1900 XT 512MB. I've also tried 7.4 on the Mac Pro I keep in my office at work that has the same issue and it's a 2x 2.26GHz Quad-Core Xeon,12GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GT120 512MB. I don't recall their specific configs, but I also tried a later model G5 and my three current laptops - two 15" MacBook Pros and a 13" MacBook - none of which worked better or worse than my main machine. That said, I truly think there is an issue with the software as that's a pretty reasonable hardware spread to have the same issues on across the board.

All I'm asking for here is for e-on to acknowledge the issues and get them fixed. This is not a $15 piece of shareware that I'm trying to get something fixed on, this is a pretty expensive piece of software I paid $395 to upgrade from Vue 6 Infinite to Vue 7 Infinite and now that they've apparently got some of the issues working in 7.5, they want another $295 for me to upgrade again!? A quick look at their online store and you'll see that upgrading from Vue 6 Infinite to 7.5 Infinite is just $395, so basically I could have saved the four bills from my upgrade to 7, used them to upgrade directly to 7.5 and be money ahead. I guess they figure I paid early so that I could 'enjoy' using version 7 all this time, yet it's really done little more than give me a few more gray hairs and played a part-time role as a renderer for Vue 6.

I still don't know if 7.5 is that much better, but at this point it does actually display the scene correctly and that certainly has me holding out hope for my favorite application. I just wish e-on would make good on all of the non-functional upgrades to 7 made by faithful Mac users as there are quite a few of us that feel pretty screwed at this point. :unsure: