Well, I always enjoy a bit of speculation, so here's mine.

Vue 5 Pro will introduce the abilty to rig and animate its own native figures. That even sounds a bit bizarre to me, given the existing competition, but what nobody seems to have noticed is that Vue 5 Esprit has already introduced it's own animated figure format. You only get one (lo res) male figure with V5E, but it looks like it has a much more sophisticated boneing and jointing system than anything Vue 4 had.

Thing is that you can neither edit, nor create these 'pre-animated Vue meshes' in V5E, so what's the point in them? Unless, of course, you WILL be able to in Pro.

Where this takes you next though is, will Pro include a set of proper modelling tools to make them, or will there be closer integration with a modelling program? Before Shade bought CL I wouldn't have been at all surprised to see an integration of Shade and Vue, doesn't really make sense now though does it? Maybe E-on are going for a complete suite to take on the real big boys? I actually wouldn't bet against it.

John