Hi all, happy new year. I have been trying to decide if Vue is for me. I use Poser, Carrara, Bryce, Hex, but never tried Vue. The renders I've seen are spectacular - I am most interested in landscapes. And I'm using a Mac The one question I haven't been able to answer from e-on's site is if a Poser animation - say a wolf running, will follow the ground contour in Vue 6 Esprit? I think it has Mover tech. and should, I just don't know - and it is a big deal to me that it does... If so, can you keyframe it leaving the "follow ground or object surface" request.. say if I wanted the wolf to follow the surface of the ground, then jump, then back to ground... can I edit the motion path? Another question - how stable is it on Mac? Vue 6 Esprit? Poser 7 in Vue are okay, get the hair and cloth working okay? If anyone uses Carrara5Pro - is it worth the $200 bucks to use V6Esprit for what comes with in the basic package? I mostly want animation with landscape... need plants and I can model my own. I just don't know much about it - but I can say - amazing what you all are doing here - the images I've seen are softer than Bryce - and I like the plants far better. I'm running an eMac 1.25 with 1 gig ram. It reads in the online lit. that it's min. req. for V6Esprit... Thank you for any help, I don't want to spend $200 and then find I can't jump on the surface of the moon... with Carrara would adopt that ability with a Poser figure without having to use Physics...

'Mover' is actually the animation engine part of Vue. The 'Mover 5' add-on was actually the plugin that allowed Poser animations to be imported into v5, and the Hypervue network rendering manager. With V6, they have integrated all the Mover functions into Esprit. So it should permit you to move an animation along the ground curvatures (using the wizard). If you want or need the network rendering, you would have to get the HyperVue add on.

I have Carrara 5.1 and have been playing with Easel for the past few months, and am going to VUE 6 Esprit as soon as the boxed version shows up.  I do not need the heavier version since I only do stills.

Cararra is great for modeling, but the atmospheres and plants cannot compare to Vue.  Plus Cararra does not have the auto-render preview pane, and slows my work down when I have to continually select areas  to render.

Vue does not do modeling well and sometimes you have to get pretty creative when you want to create an object.  

Well, a lot of questions that can cause flaming discussions. I personally find it more stable than the PC version seems to be - never had an oom error on Mac.

Poser import works fine, some minor issues at the moment because Poser 7 writes non correct path names into pz3 files. But this is something that I expect to be sorted out soon, either from e-Frontier or from e-on.

You have an eMac? Well, not the fastest machine available I would say. But it should be possible to run Vue on that. Even when the generation 6 is Universal Binary and runs on Intel Macs a lot faster. Maybe time for a Mac  Mini?

Best proposition maybe is that you download a demo of Vue 5 Infinite and see how it feels for you - on your machine. Then you can decide what to do. Even when V5I of course does not have those fantastic volumetric clouds you maybe want.

Thank you all for your help. What is the animated import like? Is it easy to drop an animated - say running David into Vue and render him running along a path? I think I will download it and give it a shot. Thank you again. R

Well, because Vue reads pz3 files directly it is as easy as you said - load the file and see David running.

I agree with Wabe. Save up your money and get an Intel Mac. They will render 5 to 6 times faster-- probably more, than your eMac. Even the Mac-mini will render much faster. I have both Macs and PC's, and my old Centrino Mobile laptop rendered over 2X the speed of my G4 Mac.

You can check out Frederic Louguet's website regarding rendering speeds.

Though I see it doesn't even mention the non-intel Macs.