Thanks, tufif. I'm working on the additional opening scenes now. I'll definitely post some additional footage soon.

"Was this rendered in vue?"

No, this movie is being animated and rendered entirely in 3dsmax. I needed some pretty heavy FX - some that required lots of particles, which Vue doesn't have. Here's a test animation of an explosion that will be used in the movie. It's created entirely in 3dsmax using Pflow, which is an advanced particle system. Since it's volumetric, the camera can pan around the scene, and view it from any angle, etc. Thanks must go to Andy Murdock for his awesome tutorial on how to do this - I wouldn't have figured it out without him. ;-) Sorry if it's a little dark, but it's a test render without color correction:

Mushroom Cloud Explosion

So instead of splitting the workflow between apps (like Poser for characters, Vue for environments, and something else for FX), I decided to do all the modeling, animating, and rendering directly in 3dsMax, using FinalRender Stage-1 for rendering most of the shots. Although Vue certainly would have been much faster to produce the environments, I found that I'm saving myself a lot of work by keeping everything centralized until post production. I also have a lot more control over the character animation than I would with Poser, so it helps things along in that aspect too. I am, however, using some Poser props and models where I can. It saves time, without sacrificing quality.

I had originally intended to do the animation in Poser itself, and then use BodyStudio plugin to export the PZ3 to Max for final FX and rendering, but that turned out not to be very efficient for a project like this. There's nothing like having the character rigged natively in the rendering app when it comes to control and speed.

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Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.