CompuServe Thread

David, That's right, you would use Vistapro to render the backgrounds scenes and then 3DS to render the foreground objects. A crude list of steps: 1) Save landscape as DXF from Vistapro. 2) Load DXF landscape into 3DS, use it as a matte. Set up the rest of the scene and the camera path. Save the Camera motions as a VUE file from the key framer. 3) Use VUE2SCR.EXE to convert the VUE file to a Vistapro script. 4) Render the backgrounds with Vistapro using the translated script. 5) Use the Vistapro generated images as backgrounds for the rest of the rendering with 3DS. The matte landscape gives 3DS the ability to determine when objects should dissappear behind the background landscape image. This doesn't work as well as rendering the entire landscape with 3DS would but a typical Vistapro rendering consists of a few million 3D polygons. (I have done scenes with 150 million!) Because of the way 3DS works it would be overwhelmed with that much data. If you don't need all the fractal detail that Vistapro adds to the landscape you can use Vistapro's "save texturemap" function to create an image that can be mapped onto the DXF landscape instead of using it as a matte. John.