I eagerly read all the making-of posts/articles I can find.

For real movie work, 1+ hour per frame is absolutely normal. Hollywood frame sizes are much larger than the ones we are accustomed but they usually work with Renderman compliant engines, which are scanline+some raytracing when needed, so they are faster than a raytracing+radiosity engine like Vue. As comparison, in the Maxwell/VRay etc. world, a 24 hour render for one image is normal.

The message is that Vue render times are in line with what is currently feasible so, if you want to create professional animations you can either

1. rent a renderfarm or...
2. build your own renderfarm or...
3. forget about doing animations .

W.r.t. to E-On being bought, the only potential customer is Autodesk. Should this happen, we all would fondly remember the good ol' times in which a price hike was "just" a few hunderd dollars...

Bye!!!

GIMP 2.7.4, Inkscape 0.48, Genetica 3.6 Basic, FilterForge 3 Professional, Blender 2.61, SketchUp 8, PoserPro 2012, Vue 10 Infinite, World Machine 2.3, GeoControl 2