It is VERY important that you read carefully this section before submitting a scene. It will help you to avoid common mistakes.

• Please verify before sending the scene that you have saved it with all the correct parameters, such as render mode (final, ultra, user, etc.), lighting model, file format, etc. It is your responsibility to provide the scene with every parameter correctly set. The scene will be rendered exactly as you send it.

• Always specify individual frames rendering for animations output (.bmp, .tga, .rla, etc.). We cannot directly render an animation in a video file format like .avi, .mov, .wmv… due to multiple differences between video formats, codecs, platforms, 64-bit incompatibilities, etc. If you incorrectly specify a video format, there will be no output. In any case it is always best to render individual frames, for a lot of reasons: more security, better quality, ability to do compositing, ability to try different compression methods afterward with your video editing software, etc.

• Do not use accentuated / non-alphanumeric characters, spaces, apostrophes and dots (except the dot in “.vue” of course :) in your filenames (for scenes, objects and textures). To avoid any possible parsing problems on the RANCH Runner, please use only letters and numbers. You can also use the “_” sign (underscore) to replace spaces.

• In Vue Infinite / xStream, save your scene with the ‘Incorporate texture maps’ option checked. The ‘Incorporate texture maps’ option makes sure that all the textures needed by your scene are embedded in it. If you don’t check this option, and if some textures are missing, your scene will be automatically rendered without them. This option can be checked in the File/Save as… dialog.
  

Warning: some entry-level versions of Vue may not have this option.

• Do not specify a render area. This option is not compatible with network rendering.

• Do not include movies (.avi, .mov…) in a scene as animated textures, as they wouldn’t be rendered correctly.

• Do not send scenes which require an active link with the Poser.exe engine, or scenes which need an external PZ3 file. These include scenes with animated Poser characters (animated in Poser and imported in Vue), scenes which allow re-posing inside Vue, and scenes which render materials using Poser shader tree. We cannot render them, because they require resources and references (Poser exe, objects, clothes, figures, pz3 files…) that are on your hard disk, but that we don’t have.

• On the other hand, Vue scenes with included static Poser figures and objects saved as .vobs and not animated in Poser, and scenes which do not require a link with Poser.exe nor an exernal PZ3 file, should not cause any problems if all their texture maps are saved in the .vue scene (by using the Incorporate Texture Maps option as indicated).

• Make sure that the X/Y aspect ratio you ask is the same than the aspect ratio saved in your scene. For instance, if your scene has been saved with a 4:3 ratio, make sure that you do not implicitly specify another ratio in the submit project form. If you do, Y (vertical definition) will be corrected to match the ratio saved in the scene. Example: the scene is saved with a 4:3 ratio but you ask for a 720 x 576 render (so a 5:4 ratio). In that case the RANCH will change Y from 576 to 540 (720 x 3 / 4) and the frames will be rendered in 720 x 540 pixels.

Here is below a summary of these points in a concise form. For more details, please read the entire section above.