I am thinking of purchasing Vue 11 complete because I like doing landscapes. Will I be able to use the trees, flowers, birds and animals that I purchased for use in Poser in Vue as well. Do the objects and materials import easily or will it be a frustrating experience?

It will be as frustrating as loading Poser objects into any other renderer.

Since I've never had the pleasure, is it frustrating a little or a lot?

The real answer is 'It depends'. Things like textures and transmaps -should- import from Poser to Vue with not problem, as Vue has the best out of the box interconnectivity with Poser.

However.

The first gotcha to be aware of the the pathing. Poser does a recursive search if it doesn't find a resource where its supposed to be, or if the path is incomplete. External programs don't have access, so they depend on all the pathing information to be explicit. If the pathways listed in the CR2 (or PP2 for props) are accurate, that won't be an issue.

You -might- have to tweak the imported textures; poser and vue implement some features differently. Not a hideous difference.....more along the lines of what Poser considers transparent vue considers opaque. Off the top of my head I don't remember what particular features need tweaking, but it is almost all literally moving a slider from one extreme to the other.

If your system can run them both, then once you get things set up, you should have no problem importing a pz3 scene file into Vue.  

The pathing isn't bad if you set your Poser import options correctly. Textures on the other hand... Getting them to look "meh' is fairly easy. As Dale said, it's primarily the transparency and in addition any "glowing" or reflective materials that require adjustment. Getting the materials to look "great" on the other hand, involves some time and effort. Once you've done it for a bit, it's not difficult, but can still take some time. Personally, I feel he effort is well worth it.

I regularly export props, etc from daz as OBJs. You can do the same from poser. It works very well. You have to make sure in your export you include the maps. Also, once in vue you often have to change the bump setting. A rule of thumb i use is .04-.002. I combine vue and daz a studio all the time. You can do the same with poser. I always build my scenes in vue. 

The problem with objects is, as you said, that you have to include the maps. Unless I'm doing it completely wrong (or Daz has an import option that compresses maps), you end up using a crapload of hard drive space.

The other option is to manually direct Vue to each map as it looks for it. That's a bit of a pain in the neck, but if you save the object as a VOB when you finish fussing with the materials, you'll only have to do it once. I recommend doing this with any import as it seems to reduce the resources that Vue uses.

Sounds like it won't be so bad. My Poser runtimes are a bit disorganized but once I see what Vue needs I should be able to adjust. I really appreciate all your responses. Thank you very much.

And don't  hesitate to ask about things. If you have access to an image program like Photoshop, Gimp, PSP, whatever, if it opens the various texture maps, you'll find you can scale them down considerably from what Poser typically uses, for instance. There is no coherent wiki or document with all the little tricks you can use, unfortunately, but lots of folks who can explain them around here...... ;)

Quote - Sounds like it won't be so bad. My Poser runtimes are a bit disorganized but once I see what Vue needs I should be able to adjust. I really appreciate all your responses. Thank you very much.

I use Poser 6 with all my Poser content in standard Poser folders.  So Vue never asks me where stuff is when I import PZ3 files.  I have a 20% chance of textures not looking just right though in Vue.  But I can import with just Vue settings and then apply SkinVue instead of trying to get that certain Poser skin look.

So is Skinvue worth it, in your opinion? I've thought about it, but I can get pretty decent skin textures just fiddling with the material options. Of course, sometimes it can be time comsuming depending on the model and what lighting I'm using.

So far I haven't encountered any problem opening poser files in Vue at all, but you need to set things up right as others have stated before. You need to point Vue to where poser is and in the beginning I had lot's of problems..... until I realised that Vue and the way I set up Poser Pro 2012 64bit in Windows 7 don't work well together at all. So I installed Poser Pro 2012 32bit in the default c:program files(x86)/and so on and all the problems went away. My runtimes are a mess and I've got lots of them and Vue doesn't have a problem finding anything at all. If poser can find it, so can vue. I've been doing lot's of vue scenes that use (multiple figure) poser scenes and so far no problem at all. I'm mixing figures like M3, M4, G2 and props and clothing from all kinds of different runtimes in one scene and no problems at all.

I love how when you change something in your original poser scene, vue asks if you want to update.

Your trees, flowers, birds and whatever will work fine in Vue, but as for trees and flowers I'm not sure if you want to use them :biggrin: some of the Vue stuff is so cool.

By the way......... are you sure you need complete? What are you going to do with it? I'm using Studio and I don't even use half of the stuff it offers. The only thing I bought extra with studio is the ecopainter, that is well worth the money.

VueSkin..... hang on I'll post 2 images in a minute I've been working on this week.

Quote - So is Skinvue worth it, in your opinion? I've thought about it, but I can get pretty decent skin textures just fiddling with the material options. Of course, sometimes it can be time comsuming depending on the model and what lighting I'm using.

Yes.  SkinVue is worth it to me.  I can't even imagine rendering Victoria 3 or Michael 3 without it.  I have not tried other figures.  For animation though, I discovered that adding SkinVue dirt, blood, and other procedural textures to my figures will not work because their functions are world mapped instead of object mapped.

SkinVue may not be needed as much if Poser 9 is used for rendering figures inside of Vue (much better than Poser 6's rendering).

Notice how the infamous plastic poser look transfers to vue, inspite of using good body textures.

Wow, I tried an import of a fairly populated Poser scene. Vue is in my q: drive, PP12 in my p: drive and Vue pulled in all my content (trees, animal, human, water & land) from my q:poser 7 folder without asking me where anything was except PP12. Textures look nice too. Of course I don't know how to do anything much yet but I'm very pleased and excited! Thanks again for everyone's responses.

Today I heard about something called Advanced Figure Randomizer and INJ Builder that cleans up PZ3s so they use less RAM.  This will help with Vue's resources.  I'm waiting to hear back from the programmer if it still works with Poser 6 before buying.

Quote - So far I haven't encountered any problem opening poser files in Vue at all, but you need to set things up right as others have stated before. You need to point Vue to where poser is and in the beginning I had lot's of problems..... until I realised that Vue and the way I set up Poser Pro 2012 64bit in Windows 7 don't work well together at all. So I installed Poser Pro 2012 32bit in the default c:program files(x86)/and so on and all the problems went away. My runtimes are a mess and I've got lots of them and Vue doesn't have a problem finding anything at all. If poser can find it, so can vue. I've been doing lot's of vue scenes that use (multiple figure) poser scenes and so far no problem at all. I'm mixing figures like M3, M4, G2 and props and clothing from all kinds of different runtimes in one scene and no problems at all.

I love how when you change something in your original poser scene, vue asks if you want to update.

Your trees, flowers, birds and whatever will work fine in Vue, but as for trees and flowers I'm not sure if you want to use them :biggrin: some of the Vue stuff is so cool.

By the way......... are you sure you need complete? What are you going to do with it? I'm using Studio and I don't even use half of the stuff it offers. The only thing I bought extra with studio is the ecopainter, that is well worth the money.

VueSkin..... hang on I'll post 2 images in a minute I've been working on this week.

Please... PLEASE!!! help me understand how you got Vue to recognize where Poser is. I've tried pointing it to all different kinds of paths. (64bit, 86) and it just keeps refusing to find it. I can't believe that the PLE edition wouldn't do this when it SAYS that it will. I am at the end of my rope with this-- ALL help appreciated. (Sorry about the intermittent capslock...)

What version of Poser are you using and which service release is installed? PLE isn't really updated and may not be able to work with the latest poser service releases at all.

Never mind. Figured it out, although it still seems more complicated than it needs to be! I really appreciated your reply, though. :)

You're welcome, glad you figured it out!