I just love Vue 5. It is much better then Vue 4 and I'm was already very happy with that one. Here are some of my reasons why I do love Vue 5 and prefer it over Vue 4:

[1] Poser impport has been improved a lot (even though the animated pz3 import is being worked on still). One can now select and change a poser texture by it's name instead of looking for the object that uses it. Materials are being picked in a pop up browser, so much more convenient. It make changing materials on poser files, so much easier.

[2] Volumetric lights have been improved. Much smoother and better then in Vue 4. A loaded Vue 4 scene looks so much nicer when rendered in Vue 5.

[3] Solidgrowth 3, finally!

[4] 3D text, very usefull. When using a paper or blackboard with text on it for exapmle, I used to create textures mapped on to the object in Vue 4. Such a hassle, especially in getting the text on the desired place. No more of that, just type and edit text in Vue 5 and place the text object on top of the desired object.

[5] Metablobs, missed those from my Bryce 5 days..... no more.

[6] Procedural terrains. When using the same standard terrain and procedural terrain, with exactly the same materials, the 2 look like a different terrain altogether. Especially when using larger terrains, this looks so much better.

[7] Parametric mapping, great addition to the way textures map unto the object. Also the new material and function editors are cool, but I haven't really used those for any serious work yet.

[8] Post-Processing. What a wonderful addition, don't recall ever seeing that in a 3D application I've used before.

[9] Png support, needed and requested that in past a couple of times and now it's finally there.

You will notice that HDRI, GI and Radiosity are missing in my list, simply because I'm not using those at all. They do not add anything to Vue 5 for me at all. My project usually consist of 25 to 50 rendered images and that a project takes me about a week to render. That's long enough for me, don't even want to know how much longer it would take when using all of these fancy new rendering features.... Of course I played with them, but for me they're not adding anything at all to my projects ( except for a lot of time used to finish the project ). I'm very happy with Vue 4's rendering engine already and that one has been improved too in Vue 5, so now I'm very happy with it. I'll leave all of the fancy stuff to someone else.

Of course this small review wouldn't be complete without mentioning Vue 5 major backdraw: it's awefully memory and system resource hungry! It can't handle a number of my larger Vue 4 projects at all, without giving me memory related errors and crashes. Even though E-On states that 256Mdb RAM is the minimum and 512Mb RAM is recommended, I feel sorry for someone trying to work with this application with 256Mb RAM only.... Actually the manual states that 512Mb RAM is a good start. From personal experience I must say that even 512Mb isn't enough at all, especially when working on larger scenes or scenes with Poser pz3's in it. You definitely want more physical memory then.

To conclude, Vue 4 is great, Vue 5 is even better. Vue 5 feels and works even better then Vue 4 and with the major and little improvements in it, it's really worth having.

Message edited on: 11/01/2004 03:34

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Due to the childish TOS changes, I'm not allowed to link to my other products outside of Rendo anymore :(

Food for thought.....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYZw0dfLmLk