I look through the Vue gallery and I see 3 kinds of images. First are the amazing landscapes and still life type images that resemble master paintings of another era. They are stunning and incredibly beautiful and I dont think I have seen any work like them from another program. Then there are occasionally such works that include a poser figure, however the figure is not usually the prominent element of the image. Many times the skin tone of the poser figure is lacking in highlight. (I think at least I consider myself a rank amateur by the way so I may not know what I am talking about) Then occasionally I see a Vue render with a central poser figure that looks more typical of renders done in Poser but with excellent lighting and highlights and that balance between softness and detail that seems so hard to achieve. My question is this, why dont more people use Vue to render poser figures, or Bryce for that matter. Here is a piece that I have done in which I think the poser figure looks pretty good, especially when integrated into the scene. Would she look better in Poser? Would an average or below average 3D artist like myself have been able to render this scene better in Poser? Thank so much, I am loving it all, and hope to hear from you.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=886214&Start=1&Artist=miden1138&ByArtist=Yes

Honestly, no. Vue's renderer is a lot better than Poser's. The one good thing about the Firefly renderer in Poser 5 is the fact that it can render displacement maps, but thats about it. Also, what version of Vue are you using. Vue 5's IBL, HDRI, GI and GR are simply without equal, IMHO, when it comes to rendering Poser figures. Neither Poser nor Bryce can hold a candle to it. Check the link for my latest rendered with GR in Vue 5. If you haven't gotten V5E yet, it is *well* worth the money. BTW, nice render. :^)

Oh yes I do use Vue 5's more advanced render engines too, and they are fantastic for the poser figures. At least I think so and I am glad to see that you agree. I wanted to sort of compare apples to apples in terms of standard light rendering. Now Poser 6 may provide some more comparable rendering capability but I will still love Vue.

Oh nice render miden, love the full outdoor lighting you got there, can almost feel the heat coming off the rocks.

I think this question should be posted in the Poser forum, here you have Vue users that indeed do use Vue to render Poser stuff as well. I agree completely that Vue has when it comes to light tons more to offer than Poser right now. In flexibility and ease of use. I am always amazed how difficult light setting in Poser is. Thats why a lot of merchants even offer light presets to their products. However, what a lot of peole forget is that the original purpose of Poser is to be used as a sketch program for illustrations and/or for the use in other 3D programs. The render engine came later and therefore is full of compromises. My two cents. Regarding the skin highlight issue. This is another strange thing. That Poser uses black as the highlight color. This is really weird, all other programs (i know) do it with white. Which makes much more sense. Therefore i always change the highlight color and size in Vue to almost white when i import Poser characters to Vue.

aha that might be the key I am missing, now is there any way to do it all at once, or do you have to change each skin mesh indivudually?

It is certainly the case that early versions of Poser more or less up to 4 were intended only to produce posed figures for export to other applications, and the render abilities were mostly in the order of being able to do quick previews, rather than anything of a high standard. People stretched Poser 4's capabilities a lot, and Poser 5 was the first version definitely placed as a stand-alone package. Unfortunately that meant bolting on a better renderer to a program with the most rudimentary scene handling abilities. Setting up good lighting in Poser is extremely difficult for this reason, never mind the lack of a simple point light source. It is possible that CL intend to place Shade as the renderer of choice for Poser 6. The question for the future may not be Vue/Bryce or Vue/Poser but Vue/Shade. Obviously Shade doesn't have Vue's landscaping ability, but if the renderer is good, and the scene handling tools are good, and it's more reponsive than Vue, then it may become the tool of choice for scenes that don't require landscapes.

Unfortunately you have to do it for each material separately - the hightlight trick. Lets hope that will change one day. The good news is that it is easy to do. I ask for a copy and paste attributes thing as long as i use Vue almost. This would be cool for this type of work.

Poser 6 has a better renderer, so posers will (hopefully) be making better images with their V3 in a hailstorm naked holding a sword with a blank look on her face.

Vue blows the socks off the P4 render engine in all aspects. But the P5 firefly renderer, combined with clever use of the material room, can have some stunning results. Check richardsons gallery and you'll see what I mean. For closeup skin, Firefly is definitely the better renderer. For larger scenes and realistic lighting, Vue is absolutely much better (Vue 4.5 Pro too). Another big advantage of the Vue render engine is the size and scope of scene it can handle. I can render scenes in Vue with dozens of imported Poser characters in a complex landscape that still look very good, and the best I ever got out of Poser - on a well equipped system! - was about 10 characters, most of them low-poly and with a rather sparse environment.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/gallery.ez?ByArtist=Yes&Artist=aeilkema

I'm only using Vue for my renders. Why? [1] The result is better looking, it takes far less work and tweaking to get a good looking Vue render then it does to get a really good looking Poser one. [2] The Vue renderer is much faster, especially when it comes to scenes with more then one figure and some probs. [3] Vue does handle larger scenes or multiple figure scenes much better then Poser does. Just browse through the Poser gallery and you'll notice the absense of multiple figure scenes quite quickly. They're in the minority. I already start sweating at the though of trying to render a scene in Poser with 26 high res textured characters in it. No problem in Vue at all. [4] Poser is great for rigging and such, but when it comes to setting up a scene with some probs, figures, buildings or whatever it's not the best application around. Vue is much nicer for setting up a scene. Just take a look at my gallery and try accomplishing some of those scenes in Poser. Take Tale of Two Knights (not #2) for example. Tried to do that in Poser, but with 20 high res Vicky and Mike's and 6 P4 figures, it's just no fun anymore.

Oops, I forgot one of the best points of Vue: water. Creating believable water in Poser is a daunting, almost impossible task (I only got it right once, and alas, the material settings were not reusable, unless I kept the same sky, bottom, camera angle and lighting conditions), and in Vue it's a breeze.

I completely agree with aeilkema. I've NEVER used Poser as a render engine, I used to use Bryce all the time. Recently I attempted to make a picture entirely with Poser, set up, lighting and render. It was a horrible experience. Those people who are content with Poser 4/5 for full production clearly have never used anything better.

Personally I think all three Poser engines work fine for what they do, better than most if you rendering characters not environments. Poser gives skin tones a better quality render then most other programs. But after the skin tones the program fall far short. Bryce and Vue are environment programs that import Poser. Bryce does a better job of making sky, water, mountains once you learn the strange controls. Vue on the other hand has a better lay out of it functions and will import Poser animation. Another program to look at would be Carrara for it too will import Poser figures and animation. Dale

hi, you have to change each material separately for each body part but after you choose one colour on one bodypart in the highlight section of material editor you can double click and sometimes an option appears to copy the colour, and when you double click on the black coloured highlight in the next bodypart you sometimes get the option of pasting. It sometimes works and sometimes doesn't in my vue and I don't know why. If it doesn't work I either type in the colour numbers manually or I go to other materials then come back to the one that didn't work and then it sometimes works. Maybe it's a matter of not doing it too fast to give vue time to think about it or something. I'm sorry I probably haven't been very clear, Love esther

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/gallery.ez?ByArtist=Yes&Artist=Dragontales

I used to use 3d studio max 4 to render my poser stuff. I had gotten a copy of it from work. Over time I saw it was starting to show it's age, so I did some looking and found Vue as a cost-friendly, nice looking renderer. I haven't used much of it's landscape capabilities yet as I'm finding them a bit tricky to get to my standards. (basically I'm too new at it. :)) I'm almost completely happy with it, and plan to continue using vue even after my poser 4 gets upgraded to 6 when it comes out. The link is to my gallery where the last 6 images were done using vue. Dragontales

I think someone said that Posers render engine is better than Vue at skin tones and this is wrong ,Please take into account that the textures created for Poser work better in Poser but if you create a texture to be rendered in Vue it always ALWAYS looks better than Poser renders ;)

Bungle When replacing or modfing a Poser import that has human skin texture and then replacing the imported texture with a Vue mat, I get strange results. Little black pixals every where in the skin. Dale

You'll have to excuse my ignorance then because i've had no problems like this atall ?

It sounds more like you the "noise" that happens in a render when the settings are set too low. Try using Ultra.

Those little black speck often appear when you use soft raytraced shadows, especially when the skin texture has a bump map. When you change the shadows to mapped shadows and boost up the quality to 100%, those specks disappear and the skin looks good. bungle: you apparently haven't seen richardsons gallery yet. I have never seen skin look better than that, not in Vue, not in Max. If you're talking about the P4 render engine, you're right, Vue always renders better than Poser 4. But the material room of Poser 5 is quite powerful, I think it's as powerful as the Vue materials, but in its own, quite different way. "Out of the box" renders in Vue always look better than "out of the box" Poser renders. Fine-tuned skin materials in P5 using Firefly, combined with fine-tuned lights make for extremely realistic skin, more realistic than I've ever seen in Vue (including Vue 5).

Is it possible to use Mapped shadows in vue? I thought the raytraced ones were the only way. If so, could you tell me how to change that? I use Vue5 d'esprit.

Attached Link: http://www.e-onsoftware.com/Products/vue5/modules/lighttune/

Yes it is, but you will need the LightTune module for it. As far as I'm concerned it's the only Module that's really worth having. I already had Mover 5, but I'm not sure if that was worth the 99euro's at all. But the LightTune Module is worth every cent.

Great...thanks for the info. I'm waiting to upgrade to 5 infinity, so that should be part of that package.

yep it is and lots more as you know

ok so silly question by me Vue 4 will only accept Poser 4 imports? i tried importing into vue 4 cr2 from poser 5 and it wouldnt recognise poser 5 at all. mind you i am thinking of getting vue 5 but later get poser 6 - so same problem there again... Is there a version of Vue that will be friends with Poser 6 in the future?

I and a lot of others use Poser 5 with Vue and do not have a problem. You should check which Vue 4 version you have. Poser 5 came on the market after Vue 4. Therefore the Poser 5 import was introduced in a later update only. AND, you maybe should rename your Poser 4 exe file so that Vue 4 asks again for the Poser application. Then you can point Vue to Poser 5 and should not have too many problems. If you want to import Poser animations (remember that dynamic clothes and hair are animations as well) you will need Mover 5. Oh, i am sure that Vue will deal with Poser 6. But to start the development Poser 6 must be on the market first. So that the features are clear.

mm vue will support poser6, just not right way on poser6s release date. as for which vue generations that will support p6 im not sure, but v5I is for sure, most likely v5e/prostudio aswell, not sure about v4e/pro tho.

Vue4 Pro with Mover 5 imports Poser 5 pz3s, including dynamic cloth. Dynamic hair imports, but has bugs. Importing a cr2 is something I have never tried though.

thanks everyone!!

There is some advice on the black dots appearing on imported objects after rendering that I found useful when I was having that problem on page 441 of the Vue 4 Pro manual.

I love your picture. The girl looks quite lovely. How did you get the light on her and still the farther objects in shadow? Thanks.