... But I've been following the thread about Poser 8 and have been blown away by the pictures posted there, it really looks like the new global illumination/lights thing is seriously good.

But then I got to thinking (because that's my only attraction for upgrading really), what about simply rendering poser in Vue instead of upgrading?  Doesn't it have all the same capabilities, plus lots more, plus lots and lots faster, then anything that the upgrade to Poser 8 will offer?  If the upgrade costs $100 (and it may be more, I'm just throwing out there as a what if) and Vue Esprit only costs $200, and render times are way faster for Vue, does it make more sense for me to just buy Vue Esprit and do all my rendering in it instead?

Or am I being a total idiot here and misunderstanding how it all works?  The only 3d program I've ever used (and only amateurishly) has been Poser (started on 5 and upgraded to 7 cause I wanted point lights).  So I may very well be misunderstanding how this works together.  I've just been thinking that maybe if I picked up Vue (or maybe something else) just for the renders that I could both vastly improve quality  and also not spend days waiting for renders.

So my question is basically this:  is this a good idea, or a bad one?  Are there unforeseen issues that I'm not thinking of that would cause me problems, or mess up the quality of renders from using Vue as the renderer rather than the firefly renderer with Poser?  And I'm thinking of using Vue, but maybe there's a different renderer that would be better for this approach, and I was wondering if there are any suggestions?

Anyway, sorry if this is a dumb question, and thanks in advance for any advice anyone can impart.

Well, Vue is probably better in creating environments (I have to 'fess up, I only have Vue 3..;), so you can put in plants and trees and rocks and things, and sand and hills and rings...;) There's several flavor's of Vue, prices ranging from 'spendy' to 'used car'...;)

It depends on your outlook. I look at the programs as tools to make the pictures I want to see (I'll get there someday...still waiting on a 'make art' button...;)

There's no reason you can't use both. I use modeling programs to create props, go into Bryce (very like Vue, at that), create backgrounds, and pull both into Poser. Sometimes I'll even commit heresy and do postwork in Gimp. But I think the picture counts for more than the method, at least as I see it.

It all depends on what works best for the kinds of things you want to do. Vue does indeed make very nice renders (I'll fess up too and admit I'm still on version 4). You may have issues when importing to Vue but that's pretty much any outside program that you may use. There's always a chance of something going wonky when importing between one program and another. Some people like to stay in one program where they feel most comfortable. I used to import posed Poser scenes/people into Vue 4 and I still would if there were support for Poser 6 or 7 (which there isn't). Only Poser 4 (which won't even run on my machine, probably because of Vista).

I guess the point I'm trying to get across is, what do ya wanna do? Get the tools that best help you achieve what you want. There's no right or wrong about it. Get what you think you can afford.

Laurie

I have Poser 6 and 7, I use 7 but with 6's runtime......But, I render in Vue 7.4 because currently the lighting for indoor and outdoor scenes blows Poser away, period!

As for Poser 8, I will wait to see what features it has and whether it will be worth the spend seeing as I render exclusively in Vue, at the minute I doubt it will, and with Vue 8 on the horizon for next year I'll prolly keep my cash to get that.

After all;  if I just set my scene up in Poser, why buy another version just to do that!

You could do that for sure. But make sure you do have a good computer to run Vue on. Poser is very power and resource hungry, but using Poser scenes in Vue is even worse. Vue loves memory and cpu power even more. Also keep in mind that Vue is more demanding if you choose to use OpenGL preview. It will ask a lot more from your graphics card.

I'm on Vue 6 and when importing Poser figures, I do need to tweak some material settings to make them look as best as possible. Which can be a little time consuming when using a multiple figures or figures with a lot of different textures.

But it is very possible and if you spent some time and effort you can get great results.

I myself am only doing it once in a while when I do want more realististic renders. But mainly I'm after more toonish renders and for me Poser is perfect for that.

One thing that can be recommended for Poser now (and it's also available for Vue) is RenderStudio from RDNA. Keep in mind that all the Poser 7 renders shown in the Poser 8 thread haven't been optimized at all. Poser 7/Pro is capable of much better renders then shown for comparisment in that thread. With some tools like RenderStudio you will come a lot closer to the Poser 8 renders, those from Poser 7 shown there make Poser 7 really look bad, but I guess that may have been done intentional, in order for Poser 8 to even look better. My Poser Pro renders sure don't look as horrible as those shown in that thread.

I've seen people do some amazing renders with RenderStudio and it may well take away the need to invest a large amount of money at all.

I'd consider it this way;

Poser Pros.
 - You can use lights prepared to fit the pose, model etc.
 - If you need to change anything, it's in the same app.
 - Dynamic hair is only visible in Poser.
Poser Cons.
 - Slow rendering.
 - Limited to props and simplified 3d models.

Vue Pros.
 - Possible to use any 3d model - 3ds, obj, et cetera - without detail loss.
 - Built to handle huge amounts of polygons.
 - Better light simulation, plus volumetric light with dust and light gels (ex. caustics).
 - Extensive terrain tools and EcoSystems (auto-vegetation - populate a background forest in seconds).
 - Spectral2 Atmospheres (really great skies introduced in Vue 7).
Vue Cons.
 - Having to change to Poser every time you need to edit your Poser model.
 - No Dynamic hair! Boo-hoo! (I don't use it anyway, so who am I to say that ..)

Hope this helps... PM me if you need to know more :)

Cheers,

A-Spot / Thomas

EDIT: May I add to the above post that, even though Vue (in my case Vue 7 xStream) is quite resource hungry, it runs smoothly on my Acer laptop if I just enable wireframe view on the three non-perspective views (Top, Side and Front) - and that is with Auto-Update Preview enabled and Smooth Shaded in Main Camera.

*Having to change to Poser every time you need to edit your Poser model.

*Not true!.....Vue has the capability of reposing Poser characters inside Vue!
It's not easy though.

Personally I have both open, twaek the pose in Poser and re-save, Vue sees that it has been re-saved and offers to re-import it, easy!
This is how the majority of Vue/Poser artists use their workflow.

 Yes, thefixer is correct, you can repose figures and yes, I also will use Vue for Renders, it is great, but I do use Poser 6 & 7 for portraits, also using RDNA Studio in both Vue versions and Poser.  I will definately upgrade cause that is what I do, but I like to have on hand different render engines that depend on my output.  Sharen

Using Poser 7 Pro and Vue 6 Infinite here.

Dynamic hair DOES import and render in Vue - with some glitches. You have to import a complete animation, you can't just import a single frame from the Poser animation. And the dynamic hair doesn't render well. I haven't found decent material settings yet.
Dynamic cloth imports and renders fine in Vue.

Hosting Poser scenes in Vue works, but is an incredible memory hog. Reposing inside Vue works, but tends to be a little flaky.

What I usually do for my more populated scene (20+ human figures) is making each figure into a separate .PZ3, import that .PZ3 into Vue, fix up materials, and save as a Vue object. Then I rebuild the scene using those Vue objects, fill it out with Vue terrains, plants, rocks, and render that.

Vue 6 Infinite is a full 64 bit app, unlike Poser 7 (32 bit app, LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE, 4 GB max) or Poser 7 Pro (like Poser 7, except the render engine, that's full 64 bit). Which means that Vue can handle far more complicated scenes.

Lighting in Vue is easier. So are reflective and refractive materials (think metals, water, glass) and volumetrics.
Vue renders tend to be sharper, maybe even harsher, than Poser renders.

For less populated scenes I tend to render in Poser. I often use dynamic hair, and in Poser 7 Pro rendering up to 10 human figures with dynamic hair works well - on a 64 bit OS.

Setting up outside nighttime lighting in Poser is easier than setting up daytime lighting. That's probably due to the fact that Poser 7 doesn't have easy access to GI (it can be tweaked AFAIK, but I've never done that), while Vue has GI, radiosity, the whole shebang. And in nigthtime scenes I can get away with simpler background objects like billboards. Those wouldn't do the job in daytime lighting.
In Vue, those background objects can be "real" objects (trees, rocks, mountains, whatever) which looks better in the final render.

You're right .. it is possible to repose in Vue, though my impression is that little to no people tend to use that function. Saving with modifications in Poser, then auto-reloading in Vue is a great way to deal with things. I just wrote that as a downside because it was compared to full-Poser rendering where modeling and rendering of the model is located in the same application.

Cheerio,

A-Spot

Wow, thank you all for the great responses, I'm pretty sure I'm going to go get Vue 7 esprit and use it as my renderer from now on.  The other unintended but welcome benefit I foresee (correct me if I'm wrong) is that doing 'outside' scenes (you know with sky and horizons and big spaces outside) in poser is something I probably wouldn't consider, even if I purchased a good 'scene' package to use but with Vue I think I could easily do/build a lot of 'outside' scenes (after the learning curve of using the program).  I'm loving the scenes I'm seeing in the gallery using Vue, and even though most of what I'm interested in doing is 'inside' renders and I'm seeking a tool that will render lighting really well and also relatively faster, Vue also seems like it would give me the ability to do 'wide' shots or 'outside' scenes, if you know what I mean, so I can occassionally make the world seem a little bigger...

Couple of follow up questions though, because I don't want to go wrong on this.  First off, I looked up Renderstudio at rdna but I'm still not sure what it is.  It doesn't actually enhance the rendering mechanism of either the poser or Vue render engines, does it?  It looks more like a lightset/scene setup for a scene with backdrops to make it easier to do 'studio portrait' types of renders.  That's not really my thing, if so, but I want to make sure I'm not misunderstanding what it does.

Also thanks for listing the possible pros and cons of Vue vs Poser.  Since I don't use dynamic hair that's not a concern at all, and I'd actually rather' do the posing in Poser anyway (even though I know it's possible to pose in Vue) since I'm familiar with the interface (and after all, I'd want to use Poser for something or else I'd feel bad about having bought it, lol), so it doesn't sound like there's a lot of downside to the approach, and there's a lot of upside.  I couldn't resist looking through thefixer's gallery since he mentioned that he uses the approach I'm interested in and renders in Vue and wow that produces beautiful renders (I know a lot of that is due to the fact he's a talented artist, but I think it's probably illustrative of how well that approach can work).

It was mentioned that Vue is designed to work 64 bit.  Currently I'm running 32 bit, but was thinking of going to 64 anyway (running a laptop with 4G ram).  Is that an absolute requirement for Vue or will it run on 32 bit as well?  I'm pretty much decided on getting Vue now, and excited to give it a try, but I want to make sure my system will run it first.

Anyway, thanks again for all the great responses, I'm now seriously looking forward to getting Vue and seeing all the nifty things it can do.**
**

As for 32bit/64 bit, I don't know about Vue 7.
Vue 6 Infinite comes both as 32 bit and 64 bit in one package, while Vue 6 Easel and Esprit are 32 bit only.