The Vue object is a terrain object. (The grass field in the foreground in the last image post). Yes it is polygons (Triangles actually). I have tried exporting the terrain from Vue and importing it into Maya as a native object but the results are just crap. The displacement and bump comes across nicely but the diffuse, specular etc are shite. My texturing skills just aren't good enough to recreate the same result.

I have tried all the different lighting models available except GR (My machine can't cope with it). I have tried the option of using the Vue environment together with MR sun & sky. Latter actually works quite well, one just needs to tweak the color balance on MR sun a bit.

The other alternative for me is to create a smoothed version of my plane and import that into Vue. Down side of that is the polycount as well as the need to redo all the materials. I can't use mia_x as a Vue material and the UV mapping of objects is a bit dodgy in Vue. (I suspect more a case of me not really understanding the difference between world parametric and object parametric).

This little thing of AO has had me occupied now for nearly 2 weeks. I have gone thru google, bing, yahoo and excite and found a couple of posts in 2009 and 2010 where people have had the similar problem but the threads just died without a definitive answer. I now understand ctbram's frustration with his shadinggroup in outliner problem.

I'm slowly approaching to that horrible thin line called "Why bother?".