no demand on your time was asked nor is required, of course. I just think people are not comparing oranges to oranges on this issue. As for the box sitting there...it was purchased in a burst of enthusiam about the renderfarm, the dual-cpu support, the support for DEM files, and yes, the radiosity/HDRI/GI features of Vue. However, in the interim, I have really gotten great results in Poser5, with face-off's Natural Skin Shader (and the exporation of other shader power it has led me into), for my specific purpose. I have grown to appreciate depth shadow mapping over ray-trace, it's more my style. Most of my scenes are at night, so GI or skylighting is not big for me. I don't need any of Vue's vegitation generation or scenery gen. So you can see, the Firefly engine is perfect for me. I will not open the box of Vue unless the probability of me going out of Poser becomes evident. It's not the cost of the package...it's the cost of the learning curve. I will probably not rest easy, however, despite what I just said, unless I do some time trials between the two packages. ::::: Opera :::::