What is the advantage of getting Vue to render in? Besides creating backdrops, does Vue have a better or faster rendering engine or something like that? Could it help me make more photorealistic Poser chacters?

No it doesn't render faster. Vue can make terrians, more realistic lighting, reflections etc.

Check the vue galleries here some very impressive stuff can be seen.

Vue has a ray tracing render engine that is more advanced than the one in Poser. You can achieve quite nice effects in Vue that is impossible in Poser, like reflections, volumetric lighting etc. Vue also imports Poser pz3 files directly, so it's pretty easy to render a Poser scene in Vue.

Volumetric lighting is different how? Is there a place where I can get more information on 3d terms?

go to http://www.e-onsoftware.com and download the demo version of Vue to see what it does. The difference between volumetric lighting in Poser and Vue is this: Poser doesn't have volumetric lighting. Vue does.

Volumetric lighting means that the light beam is rendered as visible. You can get effects such as smoke and dust visible in the light beam, the light interacts with the athmosphere. Vue has volumetric athmospheres too, you can get mist and haze as well as sunset effects. All these things increases the rendering time a lot, though!

Lotsa programs out there that you can import your poser meshes to. Bryce is my favorite, though it is easier with third party apps like Grouper etc. Vue I don't have, but word is that the program is catering to the Poser folks by making the import more robust. You can import to photo realistic programs like Pandromeda (MojoWorld) or use your poser figures in Cinema, etc. Go get the demo of Vue 4 and see if you like it. I'll take Bryce over Vue.

Can you export animated Poser files or only single frames? I used to use Bryce about four years or so ago and like it except the artsy interface got on my nerves. Is Vue very similar to Bryce?

lo there you can do animations from poser to vue with the help of the progg called natural pose 2. Vue is superb as for the lighting you can get some great results and it does render faster but depends on what sys spec you have cheers dolly

Plus e-on is working on adding the ability to directly import poser animation files into Vue in the (hopefully) not too distant future. I tried the Bryce demo. Couldn't figure out the interface enough to do anything other than make a stupid mountain in the middle of the screen that I couldn't move or change. Vue was tons easier. Actually made a nice little landscape in the first half hour. My brain just isn't wired for use with the bryce interface, I guess (and don't EVEN get me started on Truespace. Gawd I can't believe how much money I wasted on THAT program only to have it end up gathering dust on the shelf here)

The good thing with Vue together with Poser is that Vue does not only import the mesh, it imports the entire pz3 file complete with textures, transparencies etc. Works very good as long as you make sure that you have the latest patch installed from E-on Software.

I also prefer Vue to Bryce for interface reasons.

Yeah, I'd also go for the interface of Vue - I think it makes placing lights and cameras accurately much easier than Bryce (but I've only used Bryce 4). I use it to light and render my Poser scenes and find the quality afforded by raytracing generally outweighs the massive increase in render time over Poser's scanline engine. Not that Vue's inhernently slow, raytracing just takes longer. Poser lets you build great scenes, Vue provides the finishing touch, for me at least.

there's a certain crispness to a bryce render...vue has a warmer, softer look...aesthetically speaking