I'll start by saying I'm unfamiliar with 3d. We are currently in the market for a 3d terrain program so I downloaded the trial version of 4 pro and have found it to be easy to use. No one in our office has any 3d experience, so easy to use is nice. What I'm curious about is what I can expect for render times. Rarely will an animation be over 30 seconds and most likely around 10 -15 seconds. The trial version has a 5 sec max for ouput and I'm having render times of 6+ hours for a scene with 1 rock, 1 tree, 1 water layer, 1 terrian and 1 cloud layer. That's with the output set at broadcast quality 640x480 without alphas. I have it running on mac g5 dual 2 with 4 gigs of ram. This long render time scares me because in 2 months we will be working in an HD work flow so our animations will have to be 1920x1080. What can I do to improve render times?

6+ hours for that kind of scene and 640x480 sounds excessive in my experience. There are many things that can help with reducing render times : - you can reduce the bump value for distant objects - make sure you are not using anything 'blurred' that is not necessary (blurred shadows, reflections, transparancy, motion blur and depth of field). If you don't need it - turn it off. - you can use User settings (in rendering options) and fine tune the number of rays (minimum and maximum rays) and level of antialiasing. - with an animation, you can also use network rendering and cut down the overall time

Well, i think for unexperienced users Vue is a very good choice. Easy to learn, easy to use and excellent results. Lets look at the render times. Ok, you had 5 seconds with 25 frames per second if you do it in good quality. That makes 525=125 frames. You rendered 6 hours means 660=360 minutes. So you rendered 360/125=approx. 3 minutes per frame. Does not sound too bad for me. Especially with water in it. Transparent water is always something that will expand render times in 3D (you will learn). As all transparent items are. A lot to calculate for the program there. I think Agiel said it already. The good thing with Vue is that you can render in a network. Or, what i often do do the scene setting on a Mac and render it on a Windows box. All possible, i never had a problem with files transfered from one platform to the other. Especially whan you have the Pro line of Vue where you can embed the textures (bitmaps) into the files so that Vue does not have to find them. A VERY handy feature. Let us know if you have any more questions.

Attached Link: http://www.e-onsoftware.com/Products/vue5infinite/

and since its a company were talking about, invest in v5I eta march 15, it will let you render animations alot faster then v4Pro thanks to baking and some other improvements. As far as user friendliness and being smooth to work with, vue is the perfect choice, but i feel your company will gain alot more by vue5Infinite instead of going with vue4Pro. feel free to check the vue4 vs v5I comparision @ the bottom of that link.

v5I is what we were looking at getting. The ecosystems will be particularly useful, but v4p is what they had a demo of on the website. At least that's what I found. I guess we'll have to figure out the network render as the majority of our scenes will contain water. Another question, will we need poser if we want to animate fish movements, both swimming and gills breathing? We do fishing/hunting television and our reason for wanting to go 3d is for some short illustration purposes. After doing research I've really liked what I have seen vue do with terrains and the simplicity of its us, the next step is figured out how to get fish/animals into the scenes. Like I said in the first post, no one here has any 3d experience so this is a whole new realm for us.

v5 (esprit and Infinite) supports preanimated meshes (animated animals/humanoids etc) but i have no idea if e.on will ship v5I with any type of fish. Other then that using poser to pose models and then animate/render them in vue is an excellent choice and both applications work realy good together. Once youve imported a poser character into v5I youll be able to repose it in poser and the character in v5I will update to the new pose (if you want it to of course). As for what type of preanimated meshes v5I will ship with youll have to get someone from e.on to come around and answer that.

Thanks for your help and advice.

you'll fine I believe that the Vue Infinite will be much faster.. not sure but Pro isn't mac/multi processor aware.. so you're only using 1/2 the power, I could be wrong... if someone else knows please butt in :) I'm only using Vue 5 and it is slow compared to programs like Carrara which is WAY faster rendering, they have a nice plant & terrain with carrara but still nothing like Vue's render farms are a good answer.. get a bunch of $50 PC's and/or Macs and just stick them in some room somwhere. I use Vue a lot for animations by just rendering one big image for a background then using it as an alpha plane or background in Carrara which has a little bit better and WAY faster render engine. just a thought for ya :)

In reference to Thomllama's post, all of the (PC) versions of VUE are Multi-processor aware - however, you need XP Pro or Win 2000 to take advantage of the multi-processor capabilities. I think when the dual core chips come out, all of the windows versions will take advantage of them . . . (not just pro) . . . although I'm not 100% certain about the dual cores . . .

Well, Poser is never a wrong decision. Especially because there are a lot of good and some even free models that you may want and need. For examples some excellent fishes from JTrout that you can pose and animate in Poser. Look at my image "green" (in my gallery) to get an impression. All objects there are preposed Poser objects that are imported to Vue.