Yep, Vue does well with .3ds files (and .lwo, .cob, .dfx...)allowing for scaling tweaks, of course. And Microcosm and Vue work well together. And you -may- want to check out the demo of VuePro; there are a few features there that could be of benefit. One is the dynamic vegetation. The VuePro native plants have a wind effect for animation...but the intensity settings you place in the unrendered scene affects the plant model, so you get trees and weeds that are 'bent in the wind' in static scenes. Plus the Vue plants use Solid Growth, an E-on proprietary scheme, so that no two plants are alike (two maple trees will have different branch placements, leaf densities, trunk shapes, etc). Both versions of Vue have distributed network rendering capablility; Vue just has it for animation, but VuePro can render a single image in sections across a network, letting you -really- pack an image and not have to wait 30 hours for a render with lots of volumetric light effects, for instance. Oh, and VuePro has the plant editor, which allows you to change the leaf and foliage maps on the plants, so you can kit bash new or alien looking plant species out of what exists. You might also want to check out Transpond's store over at RDNA, and the wonderful architecture sets he has, and liteluvr here, for his backlot series. Both work well in Vue as well as Poser, and you can get some interesting new structures with a little tweaking and texture changing.