Mixed media in 3D ... result: so nice!

Victoria 4.2 (by DAZ), in a landscape created in Vue and finished in Gimp. Talk about mixed media! The chimney smoke and the birds are Ron's Birds and Ron's Smoke (you can buy both from the DAZ store). The Vue landscape involves three terrain object, five trees and a couple of patches of grass, plus a sky. Victoria is wearing the Rock Star hair, the Yaana skin map (Native American ... could also be Greek or Italian -- it's a beauty of a skin map -- from Renderosity), and the new costume, Ephi's Arabesques. (Also from Renderosity, on sale for just a few bucks. The costume works in DAZ on the OBJ level, but the textures don't work in DAZ -- they're designed to work in Poser, admittedly. So I just replaced them with my own textures, which worked out fine.)

Here's the whole backdrop, before I cropped out an 800x1000 area of it, to use as the background in the DAZ scene; and here --

Is the whole shebang in Vue, complete with the company logo that you can only get rid of by updating to a lot of plugsins and addons. Later, guys, when I have the bucks! For the moment, I'm going to crop off the bottom, okay?

Really getting the hang of Vue now: figured out how to position trees, grass, plants, how to sculpt bits of land and fly the camera around over them. It's a million percent easier than Bryce, and I have to say, the results are soooo much more realistic!

Also, I stand corrected -- having corrected myself! Vue DOES give away their core program for free! Mind you, I had to stumble into the page where you can download it, by accident. No way to find it by looking for it (!) but if you walk backwards in the dark, you'll eventually blunder right in!

So -- forget the previous posts where I said they don't give it away, because they do. However, you *do* have to buy the render engine (RenderUp, for $70) and to import proper models, you also have to buy the Import plugin (30). So you're back to $99 for Vue 8.5 Frontier, whereas the freebie is called Pioneer. And it's well worth one's while to go the extra hundred and get Vue 8.5 Esprit ...

Which I would, like a shot, with one small problem:

Vue 8 Pioneer won't stop crashing. Version 7 didn't crash at all, and version 8 is a tough act to keep up on its feet. So I reverted to 7; and guess what? After I've installed 8 and have a few dozen crashes, now 7 is crashing 80% of the time too. On a quad core with massive amounts of RAM and a Gig's worth of NVidia card.

So here's my dilemma: there's an incompatibility in the system somewhere that juuuust might make Vue 8.5 Esprit well and truly crippled. Do I really want to lash out a couple of hundred bucks, and then find out I can't run it? [Sounds of artist tearing out hair]

Bear with me, everyone: I'll get this worked out somehow!

Jade, 5 July