Quote - I've never used Vue, and recently discovered I'm $250 away from a copy of Vue 2014 Complete.  As a burgeoning artist, one of my interests is hyper-realism.  Vue looks like it could help me explore that, far beyond what Reality 3 offers.

Is the bridge from Poser worth the investment?

As long as the shallowness of your wallet is not the issue, my answer would be a mild YES.

I'm using both, and integrated, for sort of similar reasons.

Let me clarify my point of view, especially on the things which I miss in the earlier posts (unless I read them too fast, my fault, sorry).

Vue can pick up Poser in various ways. Of course it reads Poser scenes and turns everything into Vue equivalents, but it can also put Poser itself in standby and use it. That is: it directly ! uses all Poser dials etc for posing (and animating) figures, and/or it calls the Poser material tree to supply the surface definitions at render time, instead of using Vue materials. That's integration.

Do note that Poser offers advanced surface properties like scattering, great for skins, but also blinn highlights and clay diffuse surfaces and hair and velvet nodes to give improved realism. Vue on the other hand is far better in environmental lighting and scenes with an atmosphere, plus the vast amount of vegetation in scenes. Look at Massisan's gallery, for instance. No way to do that in Poser. Populating a scene with 25.000 plants is different from just instancing, you know.

But... Vue as well as Poser both are biased renderers, they make realism with a trick. For even better realism, you need to master LuxRender (via Reality), Octane (has a Poser plugin), VRay or alike. RGUS issues Poser shots about daily using Octane. Unfortunately, none of those renderers is able to handle Vue's vast amount of vegetation details.

On the other hand, Tiff666 shows in his gallery that one "only" needs to master Poser/Firefly to get marvelous horror results.

And... no tool is an island. The main results are done in post, applying multi-pass rendering to the full. Then you need Vue Extreme/Infinite.

My 2ct. Have fun!

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Usually I'm wrong. But to be effective and efficient, I don't need to be correct or accurate.

visit www.aRtBeeWeb.nl (works) or Missing Manuals (tutorials & reviews) - both need an update though