I've been toying with the idea of upgrading older version of 3DS Max anf getting Body Studio to import poser characters into MAX. Is Vue 4 a viable alternative? How good is the import of Poser 5 animations and characters? How do the render times compare to Poser 5? Does Vue 4 work well for inside scenes as well as it does for out side scenes? I aappreciate and imput some one can give me on this subject. (I've been to their web site but I would really like to get some insite from people who are using it.) Thanks

It's terrible. But don't take my words. Do a study in the feedback section on the vue site. Its well hidden and usually deleted but there are alot of unsatisfied customers. Animation is retarded in this program. You can only bring two animated poser objects in before cross talk takes over the scene. Meaning both imports start acting the same. Not good when u r animating a dog and a fish. Which means you will have to compostie the final scene in After Effects. More tedious work. The keyframing is very bad and so is the interpolation. Everything u want in an animation package is not here. Software should be intuitive.

Attached Link: http://www.belino.net

Guitta

An artist's tools have direct relation to the time spent on creating the art. Bad tools take longer to achieve great art and cause more frustration in the artist. To me 3d studio max is the most intuitive and the brazil render is the best. Vue can't even put a shadow onto that. You only live once buy 3ds studio max. You are worth every penny of it. Save yourself the frustration.

Thorgrim, I don't have Max and cannot judge it. But what I know is the difference of price between Max and Vue:-). Guitta

You get what u pay for.

Thanks for the input. Guitta - That site was what made me consider Vue for animation in the first place. Fantastic work. Purlionius - Can you give any details on what features you found did not work as expected and more info on your experinces with the product.

I have vue 4. My friend sold me for $20. I played around with it. I liked it and decided to pay an extra $80 to even $100 for selling me such a great app. But since he bought it from someone too, the app was now 3rd hand and due to some reason it was labeled as pirated by eon and my serial siezed to work and had majot conflicts with poser 4 and 5. I could not upgrade to 4.12 or 4.2. I decided to buy vue pro along with mover 4. Its AMAzing. I mean ofcourse I am not good at this stuff. But a sucker like me can make some pretty neat stuff, I will post some work asap.

Thorgrim; At the moment, The Mover 4 import capabilities are limited to what you could generate with Poser 4. As in no dynamic hair or cloth at this time. E-on is currently working on Mover 5, which is supposed to have the full P5 support. I'd be interested in the actual problems purloinus has been having myself. The hyperbola and pyrotechnics show has gotten rather old; search the forums and you'll see what I mean. He is correct that there is no highly detailed keyframe setup in Vue. But what is there is more than adequate for the basic primitives modelling ability that Vue has. Poser is the app with the keyframe and graph editors (and I frankly have to wonder about someone who talks about 'intuitive software' and then recommends 3DWS Max, probably the most unintuitive high end app out there). And there is a lot of experience out here, and plenty who consider it worth getting up to answer someone's questions. I've gotten the help, so has a lot of others, and I've been able to help a few times myself (gonna have to set up a quicky to check into the more-than-two figure import that was mentioned, and see if it is (a) replicable, (b)figure specific, and (c) if it originates with Vue, or is a carry over from Poser...which had serious potential cross-talk issues until P5. Of course all the tricks people used in P4 that exploited crosstalk were broken...). Phoul is a master, no two ways about it. He has also done cinematography professionally, and it shows.

jot, we are looking forwards to see what you bring out. And we are here to help you if needed. You will love Vue. Guitta

I'm hoping Vue Pro addresses some of the MANY ANIMATION RELATED problems (i.e. deficiencies) with Vue. (I'm waiting for my copy -- almost three weeks now.) Although I fear most of them are not, but here are just a few of the problems I've found with Vue when it comes to animation:

1. Import of any Poser animation other than the most basic of figures or objects brings the timeline (and the interface to some extent) to literally an unbearable screeching halt. It is, for all-intensive purposes, unuseable. How Phoul (Philippe) does it I have no clue -- either his does not exhibit this behvaior or he has the patience of a Saint. But he too is what won me over to Vue, but I've been extremely disappointed thus far.

2. Simple things, like COPYING/CUTTING and PASTING keyframes does not exist in Vue. How they missed this I have no idea.

3. Working with keyframes in Vue is probably the worst of any animation package I have ever used. Even the $50 Cool3D Studio works better in this regard.

3a) Selecting, deleting, adding, etc. are all very unintuitive. It hard to tell what you are selecting, and half the time the right-click menu does not have what you need. (i.e. add keyframe, delete keyframe, etc) because of the awkward selection process.

3b) Not possible to simply add a keyframe for an element. You must move the object, then move it back. Which is a real PITA as I'm sure you can imagine. And for things like rotation, etc., it's near impossible.

3c)Interpolation is somewhat weak, and many of the things have been oversimplified (i.e. dumbed waaay down) to be useful for all aniamtion approaches and desired results.

1. The graph editor is also very poorly implemented. It is broken down into decimals rather than time. Completely ludicrous. Although they supposedly have fixed this in Pro thank goodness.

2. ANIMATION FLICKER: Absolutely horrible and very difficult to get rid of "texture-noise" when the camera has any kind of movement.

3. RENDERCOW: Does not save images (when doing an image sequence) as they are created, so if you have a crash or loss of power, they're gone.

4. OpenGL support is basically non-existent.

5. Animation automatically eases-in/out no matter what settings you use.

6. No way to turn off auto-keying.

There's more (minor annoyances), but that sums it up pretty well. Fortunately, there are a lot of nice things about Vue, and I truly believe they can easily fix most of the items mentioned above. Hopefully some of them are already fixed in Pro.

-Tim