Vue 7 Vista Activation Tip

A quick, but important, tip for users of Vue 7 with Windows Vista: if you keep getting an error message on start up that you're Vue 7 activation code isn't right try running Vue in administrator mode.

Tip: Hand Held Camera Shake in Vue

To give your camera movement in an animation the hand held camera look you can use the vibration controls in the animation tools. You can change the magnitude of the vibration over time to vary the effect or to simulate outside forces acting on the operator or the operator moving.

Tip: Swaping Z axis for Y

If you prefer Y to be the vertical axis instead of Z you can changed this in File -> Options -> General Preferences Tab -> World Coordinate System Box -> Y-Axis Up Check Box.

Tip: Render Times

This tip comes from Frédéric Louguet (aka Render Fred) and draws on his experience running the RANCH renderfarm.

Here is something I have added to the RANCH Renderfarm User Guide (as we had seen this problem with several customers), but I think it might be helpful to everyone. The purpose of this tip is to detect scenes which require incredibly long render times... before it is too late.

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Before sending us a still image to render, ALWAYS do the following test: render your scene on your system with all the final parameters, but in 16 pixels wide (for landscape images) or 16 pixels high (for portrait images). For example if your image has a 4:3 ratio, render it in 16 x 12 pixels, Render to Screen mode.

It seems like a joke, but really it is not. For a "normal" scene, even in ultra mode, the render time should be very fast (a few seconds to a minute for complex scenes). Note: count only the render time, not the preparation time which will be the same, even in high resolution.

BUT IF THE RENDER TIME IS > 1 MINUTE, YOU ARE IN TROUBLE!
(on a Core 2 Duo @ 2 GHz for instance)

It means it could take a VERY long time on the farm in high resolution and that it would cost you a lot of money. Typical symptom for these “nightmare scenes” : Vue quickly displays 100%, but the "finished!" message appears only after several minutes.

Tip: Resume Render

Resume Render allows you to stop a long render, save it, leave Vue, come back, load the scene again and start the render where it had reached rendering before. To use resume render you must have resume render info switched on. It isn't available for Open GL and Preview renders. To turn it on go to the Render Menu and turn Generate Resume Render Info on

Tip: Don't Use External Binary Morph Targets in Poser

When saving poser figures if you use the setting Use external binary morph targets your figure will revert to the underlying model when you import it into Vue. So if your not seeing the fruits of your hard work from Poser in Vue check you've not got Use external binary morph targets turned on.