I have long considered buying Vue, but thought I should ask a couple of questions that might help me decide when and if I should...

How does Vue's rendering time compare to Poser's?  I know it is capable of a lot of things that Poser is not, but how does the speed compare when rendering similar images? 

How hard is it to match Vue and Poser images?  If I set up a figure for rendering indoors in Poser, will I have to make a lot of changes to get that character looking right in Vue?  Will I have to create a version of my characters for both programs? 

How well does Vue handle Poser's newer features, such as weightmapping, joint centers, sub-d, and unimesh?  What about bullet sims?

Finally, would Vue be able to load a scene incorporating Nerd3D's Smokin Flames or Dust and Trail Tool?  I know it can handle figures, but wasn't sure if something like billboard props would be supported also.

Vue can handle entire Poser scenes in two ways
 - either it absorbs them and make them a Vue scene, with Vue objects and Vue materials
 - or it leaves it as a Poser scene, which means you're dealing with Poser via Vue, with Poser objects and the Poser materials tree.

Of source the latter runs two completely loaded apps in parallel so your machine has to be able to handle that (go 64bit OS/PoserPro/Vue and loads of RAM).
As can be expected, Vue materials are different from Poser, so things get lost in translation and recent additions are not supported (yet). For skins, which are quite sensitive to that, spacial products (Skin Vue) are on the market.

So generally, materials require a tweak while also all lights, cameras and atmosphers has to be re-setup aswell (these are not transfered anyway).

Vue is especially good in scenes under IDL-conditions, mainly with shiploads of vegetation in. As a result, it is quite faster than Poser for similar scenes, but scenes usually tend not to be similar (Poser cannot handle those volumes of trees etc).

But when you consider Vue for IDL-rendering only, there are good alternatives nowadays, which are cheaper, better and sometimes faster.
 - LuxRender (free), interfaced into Poser with Reality3 (a few tens of $). Not faster, required quite a serious machine.
 - Octane, interfaced into Poser with a special pluging (a few hundreds of $ with a free demo version), runs entirely in your nVidia (!) graphics card but can handle large images realtime (follow the Poser cam directly). That is, when you throw enough HW at it.

In both cases, high end results require that you tweak the materials and the lighting for those specific renderers.

Personally, I tend more and more to use Vue for vegetation-rich outdoor scenes, and one of the other solutions for portraits. For the time being that's the Reality/LuxRender route until I get the money for the Octane SW and a massive upgrade on my video cards.

Some more answers to your questions....

I don't think Vue11 works with the newest version of Poser yet.

It is very hard to match poser and Vue images, you will never get the same look as in Poser, since the rendering engines are very different. I did a few test cases for a vendor a little while back with some one of her Poser figures. It showing the different options in Vue for rendering figures. They're not awesome or the best, but they give an impression what is possible in Vue. The link to the character used and renders in Poser are in the description.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2429164

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2428966

Next thing.... rendering times. Very easy to answer, Vue is slower.... a lot slower, but it depends on what you do with it. If you do one figure with a simple background, as most people do in Poser, it will be about the same rendering time. If you're going to add stuff to it (trust me you will once you're starting to use Vue) then the rendering time will increase and can get very slow compared to Vue. You need a decent machine to render, don't even go below an i7 3Ghz or you end up waiting ages.

Then you need lot's of RAM. If you're going to render poser stuff inside of Vue and want to use poser shaders and materials, Vue will eat lot's of memory..... think 12Gb at least, less will not be enough, but 16Gb or more is better.

How well does Vue handle Poser's newer features, such as weightmapping, joint centers, sub-d, and unimesh?  What about bullet sims?It will simply not handle these features, those are poser features and Vue is completely different. It has different features and not everything Poser offers Vue will use. I'm not sure about unimesh, but rest, no. It's not simply creating a scene in Poser and animating it with all these features and then open the scene in Vue. Your basic scene setup, animations, shaders, materials and morphs will be in Vue, but you will loose all the Poser lights and poser only features. If you want those, stick to Poser.

The big question is what do you want to do with Vue? If you're looking for a different rendering engine then follow aRtBee's advice. That gives you all the Poser features with a different rendering engine. I'm not even sure that those render engines will support the newest Poser features. There is a huge but though...... I have yet to see a LuxRender or Octane image that will surpase a Poser image and don't even ask about the rendering times. LuxRender is slow and Octane needs a very good recent graphics with enough memory on it. If you know how to use Poser's rendering engine, they may not even give you better or faster results.

Compared to Vue's rendering all these rendering engine don't even come close. If you know how to use Vue's rendering engine you will get far better results, but that isn't accomplished in a few minutes, that will take time learning Vue and patience when it is rendering. You can use Vue for portraits as well and it will give great results, but you're going to have to spent a lot of time to figure out how Vue works first and with portraits, most Vue users (including me) never get that far.

But personally I'm not in to portraits that much, but I do use Poser stuff in my Vue renders, so you can check out some other images in my gallery to get an idea how Poser stuff looks in Vue.

I only have older versions of both so just a general comment. If you want to put your characters inti sweeping, panoramic vistas - yada, yada marketing hype - Vue is just about unbeatable. Terragen can do some sweet landscapes but it doesn't have the features or Poser integration. I'd say that if your charcaters are the main focus and the scenery is important but not the major feature, stick with Poser and whatever environmental options you have there.

If the environment is a key factor then look at Vue but be prepared for some shader work, unless you render with the Poser shader option. I don't know how well that works cuz I've never had a system that could handle it. It's simple enough to drop a Vue glass shader on a car windshield getting things like hair and cloth looking the way you want may be more of a challenge - again unless using the Poser shader tree option. SkinVue is neat, but my is that even with the latest version, you may not get results as pleasing as the best Poser ones - depends on taste. Vue is definitely addictive and wonderful so I'd always reccommend trying it (Demo?) I wouldn't necessarily suggest getting it soley as an alternative general purpose renderer. Not that it can't serve in that role but it would be kind of like getting a Ferrari for the daily commute. If you just want a very cool application, it's worth it as well IMO.

Carrara.

Quote - I wouldn't necessarily suggest getting it soley as an alternative general purpose renderer. Not that it can't serve in that role but it would be kind of like getting a Ferrari for the daily commute. If you just want a very cool application, it's worth it as well IMO.

Well, I actually do want it specifically for outdoor stuff, especially weather effects (definitely would get the zephyr module for wind).  Also, I've been working on cityscapes and I understand Vue has some powerful replication tools that might be useful in creating large futuristic settings. 

I'd like to start establishing a story, creating a library of characters and props.  I'd like the characters to look consistent throughout, I wouldn't want them to look too different between indoor scenes done in Poser, and outdoor scenes done in Vue.  That's why I wondered how Vue would handle a typical indoor Poser scene with a figure or two and props.

I have Carrara 6-8, and planned to take another look whenever it got a stable release.  I found some bugs right off the bat but kept upgrading anyway...  Having it be in beta for an enternity has put me off somewhat.  It also seems like it has put others off as well, Sparrowhawke's plugins for example haven't been updated in years (I always assumed I'd need a few of them for any serious project) and who knows if they will continue to work as Carrara is slowly tweaked with.

The bigger problem with Carrara is the same one I'm afraid of running into with Vue, that you can't just drop something in from Poser and have it look the same without a lot of fiddling. 

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2438493&user_id=352740&np&np

Don't know the quality of the Poser render using this method so I'm just putting this forward as a possible line of enquiry rather than a solution. The link is a very simple Vue+Maxwell render to illustrate the concept.

Speaking more from speculation than experience, if you want consistency, then you might be better served by using one rendering application. Having Vue use Poser to render the Poser content work, I’m just not sure I’ve heard/seen the results of that method. I think esterau has used Vue to render some of her comic so she might be a good person to talk with. I’ve always loved Mimicat’s Vue images that often feature Poser characters. IIRC only one or two are indoors and I don’t think any are closeups of the figures.

Obviously Vue can do indoor scenes so you could use it to do both. I haven’t used it for that but for the type of scene you describe performance shouldn’t be a deal breaker. I’ve found that using environmental lighting (HDRI) instead of Vue atmospheres speeds things up quite a bit so that might help indoors as well. If you want to mix and match, things are probably going to be trickier. Again, depends on the shots. Going from indoors, candle lit to long or midrange shot outdoors, skin differences between Poser and Vue. may not look that unnatural. There is an Octane thread from a couple of months that shows the same scenes rendered in Poser and Octane (probably some Lux threads as well). That’s not Vue but you can see the degree of difference between two engines and those AFAIK make some attempt at translating materials. Vue (sans the render in Poser option) is only going to give you pretty much bitmaps and colors., unless it’s changed.

I would think that some difference is going to be inevitable simply because things look different i.e. natural as opposed to artificial light, lighting types etc. I once spent an uncomfortable few minutes in a parking lot where the lights made my red car look brown. Vue’s not going to make that dramatic a difference but if you get into EZSkin vs. SkinVue plus the render engine differences, I don’t know whether the results will fit within the ‘she just looks different because she’s outdoors’ envelope. Hopefully that makes sense. Maybe at some point, Poser will host Vue’s Ozone atmosphere engine. That would be a great combination. Ironsoul’s idea may be a good one to try, though of course, you’re only getting the lighting and background, rather than a full 3D environment. It might allow you to go with the less expensive Vue version without poser import and add that on later if you wanted.

The ecosystems replication is nice. You can import objects and then vary the density, spacing, orientation etc., though you probably want regularity for buildings.. I’m not sure that you can get the ‘billions of polygons’ thing with imported as opposed to native objects but you do have the option to decimate imported models.

Quote -
I would think that some difference is going to be inevitable simply because things look different i.e. natural as opposed to artificial light, lighting types etc. I once spent an uncomfortable few minutes in a parking lot where the lights made my red car look brown. Vue’s not going to make that dramatic a difference but if you get into EZSkin vs. SkinVue plus the render engine differences, I don’t know whether the results will fit within the ‘she just looks different because she’s outdoors’ envelope. Hopefully that makes sense.

I was thinking something similar after posting.  Outdoor vs indoor isn't just lit differently but would likely be used differently in storytelling as well.  A character in casual clothes working indoors probably should look different than that same character running through a thunderstorm.  A reader or viewer has no idea that two different rendering engines were used, they just tend to look for enough similarity to continue believing they are seeing the same characters and objects as before.  I suppose effects artists have to consider similar things when mixing fullscale props shot outside with miniatures shot indoors. 

A Poser scene dropped into Vue, without any fiddling of Poser materials...just the usual fiddling with Vue lighting.

Poser Scene rendered in Vue

The last time I used anything like Skin Vue in Vue, was about 6 years ago.

Quote - A Poser scene dropped into Vue, without any fiddling of Poser materials...just the usual fiddling with Vue lighting.

That is really nice.  Very encouraging, as well.  Do you think it would look at all similar rendered in Poser?

Quote - That is really nice.  Very encouraging, as well.  Do you think it would look at all similar rendered in Poser?

Great question!

Certainly with the newer versions of Poser (PP2012  +), I'm a lot happier with the rendered output. For simple studio type portraiture I honestly believe staying within Poser is probably the best option. I still think that Poser scenes within Vue has an advantage when you are after landscape settings for you Poser figures.

I'm old school, in that I still remember the Poser 4 and 6 days, when it was easy to find a renderer better than Posers to finish your projects in.  Every project in Poser finished with an export or save, so that  you could render it in Cinema 4D, Vue or any application of your choice...as long as it wasn't Poser.

That still lives with me a little, but credit where credit is due - Poser's Firefly engine is a different beast compared to back then, and highly capable now. Yes, it still needs a little work, but for portraits I like the results.

So, to answer your question, I would be surprised if Poser couldn't produce similiar, or even better results, than I achieved there.

I've used both for a long, long time. Here are some general observations on the subject.

E-on Software has probably the closest working relationship to the Poser creative team of any 3rd party "3D rendering" software. They have direct import support for Poser scene files, including geometry, textures, materials and animation. (but not lights or cameras) While the geometry import is usually 100% accurate (including exact Poser scaling) the materials import does not fully and accurately support all of Poser's material nodes, nor would Poser materials necessarily look better than Vue "native" materials even if it did. (this is particularly true of Vue metals, glasses, liquids and special FX materials) I usually replace all Poser materials with Vue materials if there ARE corresponding Vue materials and no specifically important texture maps involved. Even if I don't swap materials, I usually tweak many of the parameters of the imported materials. 

For stock Poser human figures, I consider "Skin-Vue" to be an absolutely necessary plug-in. I can't stress enough how much better is makes Poser figures look.

In all honesty, the Poser FireFly render engine can't be compared to Vue's. Vue has 4 atmospheric models (regular, volumetric, spectral, and HDRI), 4 rendering strategies (raytrace, Global Ambiance, Global Illumination, and Radiosity)  at least 7 types of lighting, tons of shading options and more kinds of anti-aliasing strategies than I can remember. This, of course, makes it hard to quantify Vue's render speed. Do you want a good looking render in minutes? Vue can do that. Do you want a masterpiece that takes days to render? Vue can do that too. It is without doubt the single most flexible render engine I've ever seen.

The "outdoor Vs indoor" issue is bogus. Those who say Vue is best at outdoor rendering and you should use another program for indoor rendering simply do not know how to use Vue's render engine well enough. If done properly, you'll match anything coming out of Max, Maya, or C4D no matter what the setting.

One last thing I will bring up. I've never gotten trans-mapped hair to look quite as good in Vue as it does in Poser. I consider this to be a failing on my part rather than Vue's. I'll work it out some time but I'd love it if the maker of Skin-Vue could create a "Hair-Vue" so I don't have to.

*"*If done properly, you'll match anything coming out of Max, Maya, or C4D no matter what the setting."

I'd love to see some examples of that. The few Vue indoor images I've seen were OK but certainly no match for e.g. VRay. Then again, I haven't seen that many Vue interiors period - probabaly haven't search enough though.

I agree on the hair though that can be tricky in other engines -   IIRC, people have had problems with certain hair in FireFly as well. Like you, it's not something I've spent a lot of time playing with. I've seen one or two tips somewhere and it does come up, so either there's a trick or it is just a limitation based on the way most transmapped hairs are modeled and the way Vue works.

Sometimes it not a matter of whether an application ando something as much as whether it might be done more efficiently in something else. Tha gets into your resources, timeframe, skillset etc., which is probably why you see different apps used in one production - so Vue get used for mattes, Maya for other things etc. Hard to beat Poser and Vue though.  

* *

I imported a PZ3 created in PP 2014 with  no problem, into vue 11 today.

It seems like Vue and Poser are the combo I'm looking for.  Thanks for all of the responses...

I'm still curious why something like Nerd3D's dust trails might not work in Vue.  I'd have expected any baked sim saved as a .pz3 would work as if rendered within Poser.

yep and you can use the poser renderer in vue.  should work.  but it would be possible in vue to make new dust trails I htink anyway.

Vue's volumetric materials are much better for creating things like dust and smoke than any sort of clever gimmick used to "fake it" in Poser. Same goes for Vue's volumetric lighting over a faked "transparency mapped light cone".

Quote - It seems like Vue and Poser are the combo I'm looking for.  Thanks for all of the responses...

I'm still curious why something like Nerd3D's dust trails might not work in Vue.  I'd have expected any baked sim saved as a .pz3 would work as if rendered within Poser.

I'm not familiar with the dust thing or how it works. If its something with planes and transmaps etc. I don't see why it wouldn't - the caveat being that like with transmapped hair, it might take some work to get it to look right. As smallspace suggests though, some things don't make as much sense, e.g. importing some kind of Poser transmapped clouds, or water. Kinda like going to a fine restaurant and bringing a bologna sandwich with you :-) For existing scenes, sure, give it a try and see how well it works.