The links page at the E-on Software website (http://www.e-onsoftware.com/Community/Ressources.php) will guide you to some nice sites with free downloads, some of them belonging to the talanted people who frequent this forum. Vue will take you very far in making great images. However, a good software for post processing of the rendered images is nice to have. PaintShop Pro or Photoshop are widely used. For bringing characters into your images, Poser is the software to use. Vue will import Poser scenes directly, with textures and all. Poser is a great software in itself and Renderosity has a very vivid Poser community that will give you all the support you need. Modelling objects is not easy in Vue, since you only have primitives to work with. For more advanced modelling, there is a multitude of softwares out there. Lightwave, TrueSpace, Amapi, Carrara, Rhino etc. It's a matter of personal preference and/or budget. Many of them have evaluation versions you can try first. Vue has possibilities to import many of the formats that these softwares uses.