Quote - From what I've read of Vue and Blender's feature lists, Blender wasn't designed for that.  Vue was.  I just wasn't sure if a Poser > Vue workflow was worth $600 for a copy of 2014 Complete, so I thought I'd ask.

Not entirely true.  In most scenerios for outdoor renders, where the shot consists of only parts of a forest, or very limited grass and plants, Vue isn't the best choice.  Vue is much better suited for sprawling, wide camera shots of complete environments; or creating matte backgrounds of huge outdoor environments.  This is where Vue shines, and is used most often in production.

Shots that are tight, limited areas of outdoor scenes are still typically created and done right in a native application, like Maya, 3dsmax, or Blender.  The reason is because of the render engine.  It's so much faster to render ultra-realistic shots like that in a render engine like MentalRay or Vray rather than depending on Vue's capable, but comparitively slow, renderer.  Often times, characters would get rendered in something like Vray, and then composited with a shot created in something like Vue, using Nuke or some other high end compositing software, seamlessly.

I assume Blender has instancing, just like it's high-end conterparts, making things like grass and trees very easy to produce, without much mem consuption.  And then the hyper realism can be attained through renderers like Vray or MR.

http://vray.info/tutorials/grass/part2.asp

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Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.