Ryan, AMEN, BROTHER!!!!

I was trying to render a 'landscaping' rendering in VUE this past week at work.  I work for a large architecture firm and I had two days.  I wasted 8hrs - AN ENTIRE DAY fighting with vue.  I finally dumped VUE 5 i, and popped it into VIZ, then Pshopped my trees and veg in... I was done in 4 hours. 

Vue doesn't map to imported mesh geometry the same way it maps to terrains or VUE native geometry.  Plain and simple, it's $#$^%#'d up.  I tried applying the exact same settings to a material applied to a terrain versus to a .3ds mesh and they came out COMPLETELY DIFFERENT.  It doesn't know what to think of Object Parametric when looking at an imported object and the scale is just screwed.  THEN whenever I changed cameras or it refreshed my view, it actually moved ALL MY ECOSYSTEMS 800 feet approximately in the southwest direction... but there was no predicting and I gave up fighting.

VUE is a !#$@$#!@ WASTE of a professional's time.  When it works, it's a beautiful thing... but it doesn't work much.  And their RENDER COWS - what a joke!  I can render farm to all 60 machines in my office with VIZ, no prob.  But VUE - if someone logs off of the Render cow, all frames to that machine are LOST WITH NO HOPE OF RECOVERY.  So we didn't bother buying more cows.  VUE6 promises a 'RENDER BULL'... and I think it's aptly named.  if they didn't make it a service that can run in the background, then it's no use to architects.  I'm not running around my firm logging people on and off computers.  Even when it's 'done' rendering the frame it still has to 'post-process' the frame on the original sending machine- that's jacked up.

The 'Cow' doesn't even SHOW UP for use if someone isn't logged on... ridiculous.

VUE is NOT for Still shots, IMHO... I would only use it for animations... but then, as you mentioned, it's so freaking unstable, I'm scared to try and stand on it any more.

I started using Mental Ray in VIZ, AND I HATE VIZ WITH A PASSION... but at least it's fairly stable, eventhough Viz is soooo overly complicated to use.  I would get MAX 8 and the VUE xStream plugin... THAT'S THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS- render to 60 computers at once with MAX and Backburner, but get MENTAL RAY realism.  Unfortunately, they don't have xStream for VUE and VIZ 6 yet... so I'm stuck with one or the other.

here's my Mental Ray/Photoshop rendering:
http://www.vizdepot.com/photopost/showphoto.php?photo=2082&cat=500&page=1

my review of VUE for Architects
http://www.vizdepot.com/forums/showthread.php?p=30696#post30696

my issues with Rendering posted to e-on's website
http://www.e-onsoftware.com/support...p?id=1147626608