Hello, i may be as dumb as a rock, . i never knew Vue existed until yesterday when i went to curious labs's site. It looks great, and it gives me a reason not to buy poser 6 for the moment. If i buy Vue, i'l buy Vue and Mover. I have some questions though, for anyone who uses vue and poser: 1) does vue do fast renders of animations. or do i have to wait forever!!! or if i can't do full quality animations fast, then how about something like in Poser--> use Current Display Settings, so that i can render something reasonable even if it's kind of low quality. i doubt that can be, since all these mountains and terrains, and plants and trees, will probably take loads of time. But i keep my fingers crossed, and hope. 2)i have macos x, and a G5 1.8 Ghz. That hasn't done much to speed up anything i do in poser( except for like the above where i said i use the Current Display Settings, selecting the Shaded Sphere on the bottom of poser's screen ). I have 1 GB RAM,but it seems that is not helping much. or is it? what do i have to get in order to make faster rendering. I'm getting vue, and i want to actually "do stuff" not just have vue and let it sit there. LIke in poser, i can't do much cause i can't render anything i do. 3)Does Vue use a different, better rendering engine than poser. Can i expect better shadows, and lights. Does vue have lens flare lights etc( i think so^__^ ) I saw some of the sample Vue/mover clips in the e-on website and they were great. give me some insight into this awesome software package, anyone!!! Let us POSER Users put our Poser Figures where they belong!!!! ( in actual environments, with skies trees, and not just plain background pictures) Tha'ts all for now, thanks

1. I can't speak for Vue's speed in comparison, but if you really want to pursue your interests in animation, you'd best grow accustomed to waiting. However, unlike Poser, Vue has a network-rendering option. The more hardware you hook up, the faster you can work. Set up a render farm in your basement, just like the professionals. Vue has an OpenGL preview mode. 3) Vue has a different render engine. "Better" is a subjective term, but I've heard very few complaints from Vue users with regard to image quality, and it does have features not yet supported in Poser. Yes, it has a lens-flare editor. Renderosity has a Vue forum, by the way. You might find some answers already posted there.

From all that has been posted it seems that V5I is one heck of an improvement. I bought it, and hopefully someday will get it sent to me...my bad for ordering the day it came out. Its rendering capabilities have in the past been better than Poser. V5I should be an improvement on that but, having said that P6 looks to be one heck of an improvement also. Waiting for that one also. I run on Macs also and for one thing I would advise a little more ram. Imho that is the single best thing you can do for CGI renders. Bottom line is that both are new and improved and are just now starting to trickle out to buyers...V5I last week and P6 next week. Good luck! -jay Currently running a dual gig G4 with 1.75 gig ram. My P5 and Vue4pro render times have been driving me up the wall!

Vue and Poser fit together like ham and eggs.....it's a natural combination.

It's a snap to import .pz3 scenes into Vue.

E-on and Curious Labs are diligently working on getting Vue 5 Espirit/Vue 5 Infinite compatible with the new P6 format.

I don't see any reason at all not to get both P6 and Vue. Vue Infinite, if you can.

I'm waiting on my copies of both P6 and VI. I am looking foward to using both of them.

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

Have you seen the kick-butt animation they made for V5I? If not, check it out there's a lot of info in it. (And it's just great to watch).

Vue does render faster than Poser. It will also render scenes that would choke Poser.

But any animation takes time. It's fast compared to Poser. Don't expect to render "Lord of the Rings" on your lunch break.

I love Vue myself. I bought Vue 4, then 5, and I just upgraded to Vue Infinite. (Hasn't arrived yet. When it does, I'll have a copy of Mover available, cheap. ;-)

I use Vue 5 Esprit no sweat on the same CPU setup you have (Gen2 dual 1.8 G5's, 2GB RAM, OS 10.3.8, dual monitors.) Haven't tried animations on it (don't got that kind of time), but here's some stuff that may help in both Poser and Vue: In render settings (Poser), jack up the bucket size to 128 or 256... your render times will be cut drastically. Also make sure you have some sort of facility to run the "periodic" maintenance scripts in Mac if you shut it off daily... this keeps Poser (and the rest of your Mac) from getting clunky over time. If you get Vue, don't use the "Ultra" setting to render... some sort of bug in it that makes things take longer. Custom settings with everything turned on will render a lot faster and give better results. Also make sure you get all the patches for Vue... it can get a touch unstable sometimes w/o 'em. Dunno about P6 (don't even know if Vue can import stuff from it yet if it uses things not already in P5) - may want to check in w/ e-on software to see what they say first. Me, I'll wait to see if there are enough performance improvements and if the bugs are kept to a minimum before shelling out for P6. Just my opinion, but you may want to do the same. Otherwise, Vue/P5 is well worth it as a combination, IMHO. /P

I am also awaiting shipment of both upgrades. tropob, I second the idea that patience and acceptance are your first line of attack over the pace of render. your second line of attack is: hardware. In any case, there is no free lunch. This is ambitious stuff and it's astonishing we can even do it on ordinary desktop PCs/Macs. ::::: Opera :::::

Dunno about P6 (don't even know if Vue can import stuff from it yet if it uses things not already in P5) - may want to check in w/ e-on software to see what they say first.

E-on has already announced in their forums that they are working on getting P6 compatibility built into V5E/V5I. It'll be done through updates.

Curious Labs has indicated the same, calling it "a priority".

Fair enough... I can wait until they get it all done. /P

Just a word of caution before you get too enthusiastic. I have played around with most of Vue5's settings and kept my eye on the Vue 5 gallery and have yet to see a really good photo-realistic render of a figure compared to what you can get with posers render engine. Poser is optimised for skin shading but with Vue you get more of a clinical 3d-looking finish. Somebody PLEASE prove me wrong because Vue does add fantastic scenery generation but I just don't think renders of people give me the realism I am looking for. As an example, look at the two renders I've provided. They are of the same pz3 but one is rendered in Vue5 (right image) and the other in Poser5 (left image). I think it shows the difference in the skin shading (remember Vue doesn't import all the Poser5 material shaders (yet!). Maybe Vue5 Infinite is different?

Another few words of caution..... Animation renders? Depending on the settings, but even with low settings it sure isn't fast, especially not when using poser imports. If your plannning on using the cools stuff like ibl, hdri, radiosity your renders are going to take an awefully long time. Once you import more then 5 poser figures (either in one pz3 or all in seperate pz3's) Vue tends to get very very slow. You can easily import up to 30 characters, but it comes to a price. Also take note of what stealth1701 posted and as far as I know, Vue5 Infinite doesn't support p5 material shaders either. This al refers to Vue 5, if you want to buy Veu 5 Infinite some things change. It can handle poser figures imported through the new eco-system much better, but the rest of the information will still apply. When it comes to animation there are very few Vue users who do use Vue for it, it's just not it's strongest selling point. For still images, I still think Vue & Poser are the best team around.

XENOPHONZ, were have you read this: E-on has already announced in their forums that they are working on getting P6 compatibility built into V5E/V5I. It'll be done through updates. I've asked E-on too and this is what they told me: Hi there! For the time being, compatibility with Poser 6 is not handled in Vue. We're currently working on it with Curious Labs. I still don't know how it will be made available however, via a new version of Mover, or via a simple update. Sounds like they don't know yet.

tropob; www.belino.net. This is the homepage of Phoul, who has been using Poser and Vue for animation for some years now, if you need an idea of what the combination can do. Enjoy (Phoul did the current Vue Infinite demo, and the previous demo for Vue 5)! If you are wanting to animate, then the HyperVue networking scheme is a godsend. The hardware requirements are =not= state of the art (the slowest box in my own rendergarden was a Slot A Athlon 700 on an AMD mobo with all of 384 megs of PC-100 SDRAM. So you could easily assemble a small farm from old hardware people -give- you. If it will run Win2k, it can be used). Keep any comments about the apparent lack of animators using Vue and Poser in context; as in there are comparatively very few animators -period-. Ummm, stealth1701? Just a suggestion, but (a) Drop the light's intensity a bit. (b) Shift the light's color away from pure white and more towards the cool end of the spectrum. (c) Check to make sure you changed the ambient highlight; Poser and Vue use inverse color values (one uses black, the other white to get the same effect) (d) Adjust the eyelash tranparency so that they can actually be seen; that really makes the eyes look different between the two images. (e) If you are working in Vue 5, drop the lighting and switch on global ambience; that should soften those sharp shadows. It's nice work on both, but by looking at the -cloth- you can see the differences in the illumination used. But stealth has a good point, as well. Vue's lights -are- geared more towards external illumination, and will require some creative tweaking to get good skintones without trashing the terrain appearance. But it is very, very do-able.

Dale B - thanks for the suggestions but I have to say, I have experiemented a lot with Vue and dropping the lighting makes things an awful lot worse. Even with Radiosity, the less light you have the more 'plastic' the skin looks. I have to compensate by turning the lighting intensity up. I believe Vue4 pro (and hence Infinite) have the ability for a light source to affect a particular object without affecting anything else so that may help a bit (ie the uniform in the picture above wouldn't be so bright).
Again, I'd definately be interested in seeing any Vue5 stuff that looks good straight out of the box when rendering skin. There are some realistic renders in the gallery but they definately look like they have had a lot of Postwork done (Postwork is not much use if you are trying to animate a scene)
Wasn't sure what you meant about the inverse ambient lighting -could you explain that a bit more?
Cheers

This may not be any good but it was done with Vue 5E with just a touch of postwork and I kinda like the skin textures that Vue is able to bring out. Not with standard illumination but with Global and Radiosity it looks OK, even really good sometimes. There are very few posts that use Vue GI for poser figures - there aren't many people using vue for poser figures maybe they don't look good but some really do, or I am way off in my assessment. It seems like people throw some poser figures in Vue render in standard light and say "YUCK" and then never try it again. My gallery is all poser figures in Vue so take a look. Also check out Phg47 he does some great Vue/Pose work.

Sorry should have posted this one pure V5 global illumination with no postwork at all. Dont know if its good but this is what vue 5 does with this particular set up.

stealth; In the Poser material room, set the translucence color (not the ambient, my bad) from black to white, then import into Vue and render. Vue uses white for the exact same effect that Poser uses black for; you should see a softer, more diffused effect to the skin texture. I'd post the quicky I did to double check which value to change, but I'd probably violate TOS if I did..... >:P It's one of those problem areas, like the bump value was.

Thanks Dale - will give this a go and post back the results. tlaloc321 - those are excellent renders and it has certainly some of the better ones I've seen. However, there is still a 'hard' edge which makes it look digital (eg around the eyes in the last picture). I looked at your gallery and was very impressed but I still think the Poser renders you did were softer than the VUE ones. Cheers

yes i do agree something to experiment with and thank you for the compliment

*XENOPHONZ, were have you read this: E-on has already announced in their forums that they are working on getting P6 compatibility built into V5E/V5I. It'll be done through updates.

I've asked E-on too and this is what they told me: Hi there!

For the time being, compatibility with Poser 6 is not handled in Vue. We're currently working on it with Curious Labs. I still don't know how it will be made available however, via a new version of Mover, or via a simple update.

Sounds like they don't know yet.*

It will be via an update -- whether it's through direct-link update, or through an update for Mover for V5E.

Seeing as how Mover is built-in for V5I, then it's logical to conclude that V5I will simply be updated.

The fact that they are "working on it" comprises enough of an announcement for me. E-on has an excellent history of following through and delivering things that they say they are "working on".