At the request of Mike Ballard, a guide to exporting from Lightwave 9.6 to Vue has been written. This process involves UV mapping and good methods of exporting objects plus a number of problems that may arise during the process and some solutions that I have come accross.
This is NOT a definitive guide how to UV map, but maybe some of the ideas and methods I demonstrate will help.
I will be using a model created by Mike Ballard of a rather nice glass house.
This edition deals with the Cumulus clouds in the Spectral model, although they are not all designed for this model and do not necessarily look so good, I aim to demonstrate that these clouds can be used in different ways. This is aimed as a quick overview of what the clouds look like to reduce time spent rendering.
Each render is done at 800×600 at broadcast quality – the lighting model used is GI – Render times are presented as a basis of how long it took to render ONLY the sky, bear in mind that more complex scenes will take much longer than this to render.
This section will only focus on the Cumulus Clouds in order to keep the length of the page down.
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This edition deals with the Cumulus clouds in the volumetric model, although they are not all designed for this model and do not necessarily look so good, I aim to demonstrate that these clouds can be used in different ways. This is aimed as a quick overview of what the clouds look like to reduce time spent rendering.
Each render is done at 800×600 at broadcast quality – the lighting model used is GI – Render times are presented as a basis of how long it took to render ONLY the sky, bear in mind that more complex scenes will take much longer than this to render.
This section will only focus on the Cumulus Clouds in order to keep the length of the page down.
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This part of the guide refers to the clouds tab of the Atmosphere editor. It is also related to three other pages of reference material which show what each of the cloud types looks like when rendered in each of the three models they are available in.
See the Guides page for these reference guides
You will notice that the cloud tab with the spectral mode has a few more options than the standard and volumetric models, as such the spectral model will be covered later in the guide in part 7.
The cloud animation area will be largely ignored for this guide.
Part 5 of the guide relates to the sky tab in the atmosphere editor. All the renders on this page are at 800×600 and are rendered at Broadcast Quality.
The sky tab is a page that is only available in the Standard Model of Atmospheres. The default atmosphere is used and set to the Standard model, the result is as follows:
This fourth part will cover the remainder of the settings from the Light tab as the first part would be too long otherwise. For the first part of this guide the default spectral model will be used. There will be an inclusion of a cone and a cube as shown in the render below. All renders are at 800×600 on the “broadcast” quality setting.
This is a rather open ended section of the guide as it would take me literally forever to create examples of EVERY lighting model for every different type, so for the purposes of this section I will stick with the default atmopshere with spectral model being used. A basic scene has been produced with a cube with the default texture and a green “plastic” cone. All renders are done at 800×600 in “Broadcast” preset.
As an example of how long it takes to render in each of the lighting schemes a basic grass scene will be used, the atmosphere preset is “default”.
This second part of the Rough Guide to the Atmosphere Editor will cover the first tab – “Sun” which is used for the standard, volumetric and spectral model.
The settings are pretty much identical in each of the models so this will be a relatively short episode.
This is a continuation of my Rough Guide series which proved to be very popular for the water editor to Vue 7. This series will focus on the atmosphere editor of Vue 7 Complete in a similar style (If anyone wants to buy me Vue 8, please, feel free 
) I make the assumption that you own vue/have the ple and have a rough knowledge of how it works. Although some of it may seem patronising or obvious, this is not my intention. I just want to write down how it works and what it does.
This series is being completed for the purpose of me learning the atmosphere editor and in the hope that while doing so, others can learn from what I write. At present i feel that one of my weakest parts of using vue is the atmospheres I use.
If you notice any mistakes or omissions please let me know and I will amend them!
The first part of this series will be on the model types that are allowed with vue, although this will probably not be the most scientific of tutorials I aim to show working examples of how the different settings alter the scene.
Currently I am working on a scene with an old house, part of which is covered with plaster, the other is exposed brickwork, therefore two bump types are required in one texture. I had a number of ideas of how to do this in the Node Editor of Lightwave 9.6, however they where all pretty much useless. After a lot of frustration and searching the internet with no success I had a final try and got it to work.
Below is the method which I used, it probably isnt the most elegant method, but it works.
Firstly I will start with a cube.
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