Does V5E or V5I have some "blooom" effects for rendering? And is it possible to get a different render engine (e.g. third company like maxwell or brazil for 3ds) for v5E / V5I cos what it heard is that the render engine is very, veeeeeeeeeeery slow.

The speed of the render engine really depends on the settings you are using with it and the size of image you produce. I've rendered images that took 10s and images that 9 hours of exactly the same scene, just with a lot bigger image and far higher settings. How well you prepaed and optimised the things in the scene and the other factors that affect any renderer. Really depends on what your trying to achieve. While you can't get any third party render engines with V5I you can export the scene to a variety of other programmes. I suppose, in principal using Python it might be possible to attach or build an alternate renderer but I havn't heard of any to date. But maybe your best bet is to download the demo of V5 as it has pretty much the same renderer and see if its fast enough for what you want to do with it. Cheers Mark

'Maxwell' is counted as one of the slowest render engines as far as I've seen, but it's still an alpha/beta version. Vue 5 is slow on the demo version I've got, but I hear that 'Infinite' is a lot faster. Can you be more specific as to what 'blooom' equates to pleeeease.

Bloom is a post effect which rises the color in the images to produce a "bloom" effect. Many 3d games currently use this effect to make them more colorful. Its a mix between more intense colors and a little blurr. Like in this picture http://www.guildwars.com/gallery/gwscreenshots/gw062-lrg.html (its not rendered but it shows the effect)

Got it. Not sure about VueI, but surely Photoshop could do something like it.

Attached Link: http://www.richardrosenman.com/photoshop.htm