Digging around on the internet, there seem to be a bunch of "unbiased" render engines floating around that use an XML scene format. 

Blender for e.g has various exporters written in Python to use these things so as Vue can also use Python scripting, is there any mileage in one of our programming guru's looking at this ?

I'm not a programmer so I have no idea how complicated or otherwise this is but it might be neat to be able to render in something else

Regards

Frank

Forget trying to do this in Vue at the moment.  The VuePython Mesh facility is completely broken - I submitted a bug report on this a while back.  I think you are talking about the Collada format which uses XML.  Hopefully, E-on will support this in Vue 7.

The other fly in the ointment, is that for "Export Locked" or "Copy Protected" items, you can't get at the mesh information at all.

yeah, the whole copy protection thing was a bit of a fly in the ointment.  I just think it would be rather cool to be able to export to something like Indigo or Kerkythea.  I did submit a feature request for E-On to consider a link to VRay but somehow I can't see it happening