Dig beneath V5Is surface, and you will find a lot of procedural dirt. I paid $600 to find that out -- with a manual that started falling apart after two weeks of non-abusive use (that is a first for me in my ~25 years of computer use!).

Its all about semantics? Vue5I distributes ecosystem objects by using "textures (or shaders)." You paint them into a landscape. You cannot simply drop a distribution (ecosystem) widget anywhere in your scene and apply it to any object in your scene. BTW, Carraras distribution will wind around a sphere or cube without duplicating and rotating the cube or sphere as you must in V5I. I can layer a shoreline, and put a foam layer as from receding water easy to do (not a distribution function)!

Create a scene with V5I; create a nice procedural terrain, populate it with a mixture of XFrog and e-on objects -- using ecosystem. Now, this will likely produce a moderately large file.

So, you want nice soft shadows, since this is how optical physics works throughout the universe. You use shadow-maps, because they significantly reduce render time, and you don't need highly accurate shadows cast by a bunch of plants, etc. But to get more than a useless blob shadow, you need to ramp up the shadow-maps memory bucket. Now you run out of memory, because you want a file output that exceeds 1280x1024 pix! Well, there is always raytraced soft shadows, so you play with them on a simple scene to see what the optimal settings would be (to eliminate the grainy default rendering -- ambient light is NOT high). You now apply these reasonable (a lot left on the sliders) settings to you scene, and a 1024x700 render takes 139 hours on a 3.4 GHz PC w/3 Gbyte of RAM! And that is after you stop, and restart with soft shadows off at 80% completion! But there is Rendercows, right wrong! Renderbovine doesnt render to disk, and your file is too big to render to screen Rendercow is very sensitive to large files and fails often! A similar rendering in C5Pro, with very accurate raytraced soft shadows was about 20 TIMES FASTER!

This nonsense is typical of this program, and I could write a book on e-ons V5I 3D workaround software -- that is, software which has a rich feature list for marketing purposes, but little practical access to many of those features, thus the real challenge is to find (if possible) a workaround!

My description of Carrara's modeling tools is specific to version 5 Pro, its modeling toolkit is quite complete compared to anything in its target market. A recent reviewer claimed it was nudging up to Maya in some regards. But my point was to Vue5I C5Pro has most (and more in many respects) of V5I's landscape capabilities (simple -- did you know that you can set the sun position to any time at any place in the world?). However, it has modeling tools and effects (particle, explosion, blur, dissolve, atomize...etc) that most V5I users lust after. Not to even mention a decent physics engine.

Go figure! All I care about is features with QUALITY. As I stated earlier, I'm software agnostic -- I have no religious affiliation with computer software!

As I made an honest financial commitment to V5I (as well as Vue 4), I feel I have a right to conduct a cross forum comparison. Of course Im sure many zealots would prefer a software pirate who would uncritically praise e-on, over an articulate critic who actually purchased this software?