Vue Fusion... Each demo of Vue (about 6 a day) ended by a few minutes 'preview' of Fusion with 3DS Max. Given the current state of development of the software, I would say it worked reasonably well. I did not see it crash in the demos I have seen, and only noticed minor visual artefacts when previewing scenes wih ecosystems in Max. It was actually cool to see a Vue scene opened in Max, and then see some Max objects being added to the scene and interacting with the Vue objects (with reflections, shadows and stuff). Now... you need to have reasonable expectation with what this plugin will do. In short, it allows you to open Vue inside Max, and have elements of both applications interact with each other. This is a great step towards integration, but it is NOT a full integration in the sense that you still have a Vue scene inside Max... not a full Max scene. For example, if you edit a material from the Vue objects, the plugin will open the Vue material editor - not the Max material editor. The final scene is rendered using Max's render engine by allowing some interaction between the two applications. It is actually a very smart way to integrate both applications, as they don't have to translate everything from Vue into Max, which would be prohibitively time consuming (and probably more expensive as they would have to cover more licensing costs). That will allow them to quickly come up with integration with other renderers more easily. Currently Max and Maya are scheduled for Fall. Lightwave and Cinema 4D are planned for the end of the year. I am sure more details will come up in the near future.

• agiel - www.linfa.net