Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=178884

I finally made a picture with Vue :)

My questions--gracious thank yous for bearing with me :):

EDITING TEXTURES ON POSER IMPORTS

• ummm...how? I can't seem to figure out how to access the material groups. Vue just keeps giving me one material box and applies it to the whole thing. For example, I was going to change the color of the bike's hood because what I set up in Poser looked more dark blue but in Vue it was too black. All I can access is the whole bike so I guess I'm doing something wrong.

OBJECT FILES EXPORTED FROM POSER

• I built a big city block with the dystopia parts and exported it from Poser as one object so I didn't have all the bits to deal with. Vue couldn't import it. It would get half way, then lock up. I finally reimported the obj to poser, than saved it as a PZ3. Vue imported that just fine. Is there some problem with Vue being able to read poser exported objects? Or is there certain settings I should use to make that work? Or should I just not use obj files?

BIZARRE CRASHING FROM VUE

• Things I experienced that flustered the hell out of me, so wondering if these are bugs or otherwise well known issues with Vue:

1. At one point the four views vanished as did the layer window (white screen except for the material and camera pane). I had to close vue and reload the vue file to get them back.
2. The first time I added a spot light to better illuminate the bike figure, everything turned into a Walt-Disney-just-threw-up pixelated color mess (thankfully I'd saved just before adding the light!). Reload the scene, add the exact same light, no problem at all.
3. Crippling slow response when changing terrain mix. When I adjusted the show level on the high mountain, vue absolutely crawled redrawing the preview sphere. All I did was change the percentage material mix, so this seems very odd to me. I'm concerned how its going to behave when I do more complicated things.

MULTI-TASKING?

• When rendering, Vue demanded 100% processor time and would crash when I tried to multitask. Is there some setting I'm missing to make it more friendly? Or I am just doomed to not being able to do anything else on my computer while Vue is rendering?

ANTIALIAS SETTINGS:

• The quality of the buildings wasn't acceptable with final render (straight edges weren't even enough...figure looked good though), so I rerendered with Ultra. Good lord was that slow! The "render" part was around 6 minutes...the antialias part was 2 freakin hours! Any tips on custom settings to improve antialias but keep a decent render time?

MY SPECS:
1.7gz P4-768mb-XP. Vue4.06 (what they shipped me when I bought it, which I think is the current version). Vue reported over 7 million polygons in this image...ummm, is that a lot?

Thanks for humoring the Vue newbie :)

As far as editing textures, if there is a plus sign to the left of the poser object, just click it to access the different material groups. Then find the one you want by clicking on each one until the one you want is highlighted. If there isn't a plus sign, then you can't obviously. I always save to pz3 to export to vue, and I have always gotten the plus sign. My guess is that if you aren't seeing the plus sign, you are exporting it as .obj.

Version 4.06 has only been out for a few weeks. Click on 'Help/About Vue d'Esprit' to find out for sure whether you have 4.06. It is quite possible you have an earlier version. If not, download the upgrade. It might fix some of your problems.

As far as times are concerned, I have seen some renders that take 6 or more hours. It depends alot on lighting, and polygons. To me, 7 million polygons is a lot. I haven't done anything complex, but my most complex scene only has 509,068 polygons.

Ooops! Nope, you're right. Its 4.05-(something or other). I don't know why I thought it was 6. Oh well, I'll get the update and hopefully that will clear some of it up. Gee...I guess replicating that city block so many times wasn't such a good idea! Maybe I just overwhelmed it with all those polys and freaked it out? Vue only sucked up a little over 300mb of ram so I thought it would be OK. Poser needs swap file to render just Mike and the bike! Let me clarify...yes, the plus sign is there, but when I select something under it I can't change whatever I want individually. For example, if I select the neck, Mike's body map shows up on the material sphere and I can open and edit it (the only thing I can select and see a texture map BTW). If I select anything else, nothing shows up in the material box and if I try to edit it anyway Vue gives me a message about "different materials for the groups selected" and that my new material will be applied to everything. What groups? How is selecting only his finger "groups"? I get that same message for the headset, armor, etc. So where are the materials for the headset mouthpiece and eyepiece, or the bike's hood, side panel, etc. that are all separate in Poser? With the bike, the only thing there is bikemain. Bikemain applies changes to the entire bike as if it was one solid thing without different material areas. A thought...could this have something to do with parenting in Poser? I parented everything to Mike including the Bike so it would stay stuck to his butt while I posed him. Maybe I shouldn't do that if I'm going to render in Vue?

Hi scifiguy !

it's a nice first image ! here are a few answers to your questions :

EDITING TEXTURE ON POSER IMPORT :

you cannot access all the POSER textures from the world browser. To see all the material on the model open the "MATERIAL SUMMARY" (see pic above). There you can browse through all the materials in your scene. Double click on each material to open the material editor.

ANTI-ALIAS SETTINGS :

I use "broadcast" quality rendering. It's faster than ULTRA and it produce very good results. To reduce the rendering time even furter use the "USER SETTINGS" :
a standard anti aliasing (12 subrays / quality 70%) is good enough. You can also turn "super-sampling" off if it's not necessary (I always turn it off !).

Some advanced features (depth of field, volumetric light) are extremely slow to render. Think about it before using them...

For the first scenes I did with VUE I had rendering times of 10 hours or more for 800X600 pixels images ! Now I'm more careful and I always get rendering time of 1 hour or less.

CRIPPLING SLOW RESPONSE :

after each action (editing a material, moving an object, etc...) VUE systematicaly re-draw the preview in the camera control center. This is a CPU intensive task. You can disable it if you need a faster reponse : Right-click on the camera preview an disable AUTO-UPDATE. Now each time you need an updated preview just click on it. Without the auto-update VUE will not "freeze" during material editing.

If you think that VUE is too slow, choose "wireframe" preview on some of the 3Dview, and use "flat shaded" instead of "smooth shaded" for the main camera view.

Don't forget to put the objects in different layers. Hide the one your are not currently working on (In your image for example, you can put the main character, the city and the background mountains in different layers).

MULTI-TASKING :

you should let VUE do its job ! have a drink, go to bed, go outside...

YOUR SPEC :

your PC is a powerfull machine, it can handle more than 40 millions polygons and scene of a 100 MB.

Hope this will help !

:) Eric

dances a little jig around the room

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!

Material summary...DOH! Teach me not to play with all the icons! At least now I know I'm not losing my mind.

Oh boy turning off the autopreview makes all the difference in the world! Zipping right along without that...I had no idea it was sucking up so much attention. Sheesh, I certainly don't need it redrawing everytime I change a pixel.

Hiding layers is a great tip! Yeah...I just had everything on one layer (because I don't know what I'm doing...heh). Oooo...and I can drag and drop things onto new layers. LOVE THIS PROGRAM! I'll definitely give broadcast quality a try next time. I haven't been brave enough to try any of the volumetric stuff yet. I think I'll wait until I feel really good about the rest of it first :)

WOW, I came too late. ERIC 3AUDITY ALREADY SAID EVERY THING.6

For a first pic, 7 millions polygons ! Wouwwwwwwwww ! About 5 times more I ever use ! A very complex scene you made ; maybe one criticism , the town looks too uniform grey. Anyway nice, scifiguy ! Yves

LOL! Well I didn't PLAN it to have that many polys. It just sort of worked out that way :)