Yes, you would need to animate the wheels seperately. And while Vue has animation capacity it doesn't really come close to what you said you already have, which brings me to: You've got 3DS Max 8, so you don't need the modelling tools of Carrara. Vue makes a great compliment to Max (as well as Maya, Lightwave, C4D, and XSI) because you can do the more intimate scenes (up close shots of facial expressions, single room scenes, complicated animations, mocap, etc.) with those, and when you want something roaring over a complete environment you can throw your objects into Vue. That's what Vue is fantastic about - you can do the "small room" rendering, but you really get the highlights of the software (when you already have a real pro app like Max for the interiors and animation) when doing complete environments. Vue is also fantastic at just creating still shots to use as mattes and backgrounds for your animations to interact with. As far as color, contrast, environmental FX - you'll be changing and tweaking that in your compositing software. While I may be wrong about this, many of the problems I hear about seem to be coming from trying to make the ENTIRE render and "final look" come out of Vue alone (or, frankly, ANY app), when you need to tweak an image or animation from ANY software (including the $7k versions of Maya and XSI) in a compositing tool after you've finished the render. Put too many calculations on ANY app and it'll go haywire. Vue is a great choice - yes, picture Bryce on steroids and you've got it. While you can dig deeper in Vue, it has "about" that feel and learning curve. My only problem has so far been when I put together something complicated (by my standards - my scene files can get over 100megs - maybe some others here get bigger, I dunno), when I start upping the quality settings it starts spitting out numbers of over 100hrs rendering times to be expected. I find myself breaking it up and rendering things seperate and just assembling them in Photoshop - since Vue puts together the alpha mattes for you if you save as a PSD, it's a snap, and I can even place better environment tweaks (mist, light beams, debris in the air, smoke, etc.) between layers without having to do any complex masking. Hope that helps- -Lew ;-)