Finally managed to purchase Vue Studio while it is still on sale at $299 and so far I am impressed, even if I am only just playing.  Imported a Poser figure with SSS and did a quick render letting Poser do the materials and I am happy with the result.

Also found that, with the exeception of the up and down directions my Space Navigator does work so I have not completely lost it.  Took the subscription for the upgrades as well, has to be with the $8.95 per month, and the only module I think I might strech to as some point is the eco painter, all the others I need are included in studio.

Just in the middle to re-downloading all my Vue pruchases in Vue 2014 format and hoping to have some serious fun over the weekend.

EcoSystem painter is a must have it lets you 'paint' on damn near anything, I've used it to paint grass, trees & shrubs on the Dream Home yard; flowers on the patio flower beds and moss on the roof.

You can place vegetation or buildings or whatever exactly where you want them instead of faffing about for ages in the Function Editor with distribution maps.

Quote - Nvidia cards support OpenCL GPU processing as well, they just aren't as efficient at processing OpenCL instructions as ATI cards. Cycles, LuxRender SLG (GPU only) and CPU+GPU all use OpenCL, and run on Nvidia cards.

Thank you for clarifying.

I passed on a 3GB 780 in favor of my 4G 760 when I was built my render rig last October, because I didn't want to spend more on the 780.  Eight months later, I can afford to get an even better version of the 780 than what was available at the time.

Even though Cycles doesn't currently offer SSS, I can still enjoy the extra rendering power while learning how to use Blender.  And once Paolo greenlights GPU rendering with Reality, I can take advantage of nVidia's support for OpenCL.

Amazon dropped the price on the 6GB 780 another $10 to $570 for Prime members - $30 off from its $600 MSRP.  I'm not passing that up, so I've re-ordered one.  It'll be here Monday.

"Even though Cycles doesn't currently offer SSS ..."*

cough
**[https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=sss+in+cycles

](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=sss+in+cycles)**

Cycles DOES have SSS. Just not on the GPU at the moment. Sorry if you got me wrong here, in fact Heimlich's skin shaders are really impressive stuff. You need to render them using the CPU, though, not the GPU. 

GPU renders of SSS are planned, but they still seem to have problems with those.

Bantha, did you hear anything about an estimated release date for SSS to be officially released for GPU rendering?

If you compile it for yourself you can already enable it since 2.68 IMHO, but I suppose there are reasons why it's still off. I've read somewhere that it's possibly enabled in 2.72 or 2.73, but that has been said for 2.70 too.

Brecht van Lommel left the Blender project for working on the Arnold renderer, so development may go somewhat slower with Cycles.

Didn't know that, cheers bantha!

I'm currently hopping between Poser/Reality/Lux and Bryce, but as soon as my wandering mind brings me back to playing with Blender again, I'll definitely try that.  I noticed a fair few changes to Cycles on the last official update, so hopefully not too far off in the future before an official release for GPU rendering of SSS.

Quote - Cycles DOES have SSS. Just not on the GPU at the moment.

Ah.  Thank you.