For starters, Vue Esprit and Pro are not modeling applications, they have primitives and the new metablobs go a long way to improving their capabilities but I won't lie, there are NO mesh editing capabilities here, you can move, stretch or rotate meshes and pieces of meshes (provided they are a separate entity) but as far as actually editing a mesh (or parts of a mesh) Vue is not capable of it (which is fine for most users anyway as adding mesh editing capabilities would probably push the price higher and is not what most people try to use Vue for). As for splitting the hair off a poser figure, you can edit the material using the material browser window without having to select the individual object. I seem to remember (but can't test at the moment) that you can bring a poser character in and have it split the figure into it's separate parts, but then again I have Mover and that might be a mover feaure only. Regarding your plant question (as dlk30341 mentioned), clicking on the plant creation tool creates a new version, you don't need to use the editor to create a new one, the editor is a Pro only feature but will be back with the release of Vue 5 Pro (eon says by the end of the year). As far as differences in the Pro version, there are more advanced lighting options (or will be in Vue 5 Pro anyway, right now the variations between Vue 5 Esprit and Vue 4 Pro are a little frustrating). Pro has more advanced animation and exporting features for cross application support. Pro also has the plant editor of course and a few extra rendering features (hiding objects from a render using the browser rather than different settings in the render box), saving embedded alpha information in renders (for easy masking) and a few other things I can't remember off the top of my head. Rendering in a black background can be done by loading the atmosphere "Black Back" from the effects/others folder. If that isn't in the demo then simply reduce fog and haze to 0 and fog in sky to 0 and that should do it for you. Bottom line, if you are still considering Vue, wait for the Pro version of Vue 5 and see what that looks like, it will make Vue 4 Pro obsolete at that point and it will have all the newest features available from Vue 5 Esprit.