"I wonder if the truly next big innovation to go into VuePro may just -be- that particle based weather system." Yep. Particle systems can dramatically increase the power and potential of realistic weather FX in any program (if implimented well), and for things such as snow, rain, or even flowing water like that in a stream, they're hard to beat. So far, none of the "environment-specific" applications out there have a built-in particle system that I know of, unless you consider Carrara's Bryce-like enviroment creator, or use one of the higher-end apps for building environments. Particles can grind your system to a halt, however, when you start getting into the thousands or gulp millions of them in a scene. Distributed rendering is a must (and Vue already has this).

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Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.