I am always concerned about renderer and its speed for my project. It is very good to hear that Vue improved renderer quality. I have Carrara that does the same renderer but could do alot faster. I read some posts that some said approx 21 minutes. If that is how long it take. I definatly will not buy it. I am serious animator and will not want to grow old with this speed. I need some more info about Vue's renderer speed. Thanks

Ofcourse rendering speed depends on a lot of factors. Time consuming things, like volume lights, makes a dino of the computer. Saying "I'll not buy it if it takes 21 minutes to render" is pretty useless, since the person (who talked about the 21 mins) never said anything about his horsepowers or the size of the image, or the quality. I can render images in 1 sec and I can render images in 9 hours. Everything depends on a lot of factors. Myself, I have a Pentium 4 2.8GHz with 1GB RAM. Even if it's not the fastest machine, I can live with it. I usually render the stuff when I go to bed or work, and the stuff is usually finished when I get back :)

If you're doing animations, you'll definitely want to use multiple machines as a render farm. Vue comes with a license for a 5 machine render farm. Render speed? Like bos says, lo-res images with simple lighting render in seconds, hi-res images with complex lighting (volumetrics, soft shadows) can take many hours or even days (if you use Bryce it can be weeks!) For animations, you probably don't need the highest quality Vue can deliver.

5 machines umm I read some features for Vue it does not support AMD Opteron? Tyan sells 4 sockets mobo for $1500. A note left in Vue features that it is optimized for HyperTechnology, Xeon have HT and may have multiple sockets on a mobo. I wonders if VUE license applies to per socket CPU? If not then I would have 10 to 40 CPUs to do the animation project with single VUE license on approx $4500 per machine ($22,500 total).

It's one license per machine, as far as I know it checks IP addresses. I needed one license for a P4 HTT machine, which Vue recognizes as a dual CPU box. Both "CPUs" were used. I don't know about Opterons. The Athlon64 is supported. You could also go for a PowerMac G5 solution - pricey, but very fast and native 64 bit OS.

Attached Link: http://www.deviantart.com/view/11314796/

Rendering depends on a lot of factors. Take a look at the link attached. This rendered in Vue 4. Setting broadcast 800x600, took about 7mins to render on my AMD XP2400 512MbRam Radeon 9600 Pro 256Mb. There's one higher setting you can use, ultra, so broadcast is pretty good. The scene has one sun and 3 lights in it. Yesterday, my copy of Vue 5 arrived. I've took the same scene and rendered in Radiosity and later with HDRI settings. Of course the rendering times will become much longer now. With Radiosity enables it took about 20 mins to render, with HDRI enabled around 50mins. Again using broadcast, so the output quality is excellent then. So rendering all depends on the setting you use and need. Most of my outdoor images hardly ever take 20mins, only the ones where I do use a lot of Poser characters (more then 15). Also the less stuff you have running in the background, the faster Vue will render. Indoor scenes take a bit longer, due to more use of lights and volumetrics at times. I'm considering adding more RAM now (especially with Vue 5), to speed up things a bit. The only thing I can really compare to is Bryce 5 and I know that my scenes took a lot longer to render in Bryce then they do in Vue.

Optimisation of a scene for quick rendering is the real art - if you would like to have a lot of control over parameters that decide about rendering speed - you should choose Vue Pro. A very heavy scene (with hundreds of objects and many millions polygons) will render for long minutes or hours on any software. When I set a scene, since start I optimize it - thanks to this I can get very complex Vue scenes that would crash my (not very powerful) machine if rendered on other programs. Actualy I work on AMD 2000+ 1 GB - but one year ago I had only a Celeron 600Mhz and 320 MB - but still I was able to build & reder complex scenes