Can't confirm that at all, that Blender has or had problems working with an RTX card at all ! I have Blender versions dating back to the year 2016 - and they ALL work without ANY problems with my new RTX card. All of my other 3D programs have no problem to work with the RTX card either. The only program NOT working with it, is in fact Poser. Sure i don't know, how they've programmed that thing, but they must have used something really awkward, for the SuperFly rendering engine, but when i look at my other programs with similar render quality and they all work with my RTX card without complaining - yes - then i still call it a joke, that it's not working. Who cares about the architecture - all programs, games (and i have MANY of them installed and running) whatsoever run with the RTX card flawless.

And it doesn't matter, if the old owner Smith Micro didn't care anymore about Poser developement. Poser 11.2 is now in the hands of a new owner. And i say that the priority number one for them, before releasing this new version 11.2 , should have been to make it compatible with nowadays available hardware - Nivida RTX 2000 cards aren't a unknown card series, they are a fact of newer hardware being used around the world and even soon this year 2020 even a new Nvidia graphic card series will be announced, so the RTX 2000 cards will be "old" hardware by then. But no, the first and most important task for the new owner was to implement the Renderosity Store function in the program.

And they've even managed to break my working Poser 11 version, with Poser 11.2 it kept crashing right at start and didn't work anymore ! Great Job ! I had to find a solution by myself and i've found the reason for the crashes. For some unknown reason they've changed something in Poser 11.2, that it didn't wanted to work anymore with my Windows 10 username, which included Umlauts. But all Poser versions i've owned since Poser 8 up to Poser 11 had NO PROBLEM at all with the Umlaut in my name ! There was not even ONE program, game and such, that had problems with my Umlaut user name (including Poser 11). So i'm not really confident in what they are doing now with Poser starting with 11.2 !

At least a quarter year has already passed since the taking over and release of Poser 11.2 - and something like important hardware compatibility should have been fixed or worked on - if not working at the release date rightaway, there should be a fix for this done until now.

Someone tell me, that this is a joke ... i do have a RTX card now, too, since 3 weeks. But those cards are compatible with anything before, they do the same stuff like a 1080 card without the Raytracing extra functions. The Raytracing part of those RTX cards is a "Feature", not a MUST !! And if a 1080 card and a newer RTX card run with the same graphics card drivers and systems basicly, i don't get it, why Poser 11.2 is not working with a RTX GPU, because it doesn't have to call up and use those Raytracing functions. Games like Battlefield 1, which have Raytracing added to it, can be run with or without the Raytracing, so what's the big problem for a Poser program just to use the functions from the GPU it just needs for the render process. Weird ...

It's not worth at all to argue about this problem - because there is no problem, only denial and ignorance.

But isn't it really, really easy to understand ?

If the earth would be flat, then there would be the same sun lighting on each spot on earth on this "earth-disk" at the exact same time, doesn't matter if it's in america, in europe, in asia, in hawaii. Everybody can see the sun "moving" over the sky (actually the earth is moving around the sun and rotating around it's axis ;-) ...).

So there would be sunrise, sun at noon, sun set and the night at the same time happening all over the whole "flat" world. Because the sunbeams would hit each spot on earth in the same angle at any time. Since the earth is a sphere and has it's constant curvature, the sun light CAN'T reach each spot on earth with the same strength, because the sun can't "look" around the earth curvature. It's easy to check for flat earthers - just one living in the US can call one living in europe at the same time and they SEE and KNOW, that in the US it would be light and in Europe it would be dark and so on... ! They could even test this by themself, just cutting out a circle from a piece of white paper - lay it on a table - turn the light of and use a flashlight moving from below the table and in a circle moving over this paper disk and back below the table - the same lighting at any time all over the whole paper disk, just plain simple !

I don't get, what there is so hard to understand - i would even get this, if i would have never seen any photo of the earth and all other planets from satellites, space ships and more.

Following are a few images from Vue - to the left is a "flat" moon or earth seen from top and to the right is a sphere like moon or earth. You can watch the lighting from the sun on both of them - the moon-sphere shows it's rounded of phases (phases with light, twilight and darkness), but the flat moon/earth to the left just gets lit ALL OVER the whole disk surface with the same light strength - ridiculous even trying to proof something like that to a human being of the year 2019 ... !

The FBX, Alembic or Collada file formats can store camera information, by using export with those formats in Poser, you will get a selection dialog window to select the cameras available ... So Vue can import Alembic (.abc) and Collada (.dae), but not FBX (*.fbx). Vue will load the objects, but probably will ignore camera infos in those files. Still could be tested. Just to mention - Vue works great with the Collada file format - for instance, saving objects like figures and loading them into Vue - those are very good and easy to handle for re-posing them in Vue ...

I guess everybody, who bought and "owned" material from Cornucopia, lost their stuff ... that's another reason (besides the new subscription model) why my last Vue version is and will be Infinite 2016 ! It can do everything and more for my hobby - only need it and use it, when i'm in the mood or have the time, so subscription would be a waste of money to invest (i've had longer periods of time over the years, where personal reasons kept me from working with Vue - so why should i pay, when i don't use it ???).

Well, if you really need a city generator, then you could take a look into "SceneCity" for Blender (bundled with SceneTerrain) - you can find it here: https://www.cgchan.com/ . Yes, it costs money - but after paying it's all yours. And Blender is a free great professional 3D program. Or here are some other ones listed: https://alternativeto.net/software/suicidator-city-generator/ .

martial - the new 680 architecture is a lot better then the older 580 ...

If you want to spare some bugs, you should look out for the new 670 ... cheaper, but close to 680 in performance ...

I've had a AMD Radeon card in my PC for 2 month - Vue had to switch off a few things (like background draw for instance), because it wasn't a Nvidia card.

AMD Radeon cards don't use CUDA - that's a NVIDIA specialty. Radeon cards use something close, but not as strongly supported as CUDA, which is called OpenCL !

After getting the new Nvidia GTX 680 (single GPU) card, Vue works great with this graphic card. It doesn't use the GPU for rendering (CPU), but it supports (since Vue 10 or was it Vue 9 ?) the calculation of Anti-Aliasing using the GPU to speed it up. Important, too, for sure, is the onboard RAM amount. They've got at least 2GB , which will help with displacement-mapping and heavily loaded scenes.

Surely the 690 version (double GPU) is for sure a monster card for speed ! The 680 is already very fast, but logically a twin GPU card like the 690 beats it by huge steps. The fastest card so far - but really expensive !

The now to be released GTX 670 card is just a little weaker then a 680 (first tests shown that), but cost wise it spares you quite a lot of money for barely loosing too much speed compared to a 680 card.

So - 690 is for sure top-notch - but the price with more then a 1000$ is quite something - unless you don't have a problem to spend ...

Sure - Quadro cards are pro cards for CAD or stuff like that - but those are not as versatile in their use and strength with everything 3D (...like running stuff like Skyrim game or others) you like to run on a PC besides 3D software like Vue,3dsmax and such.

I've had the same problem - installing it first with 64bit AND 32bit - i got the above mentioned error "numpy.core.multiarray failed to import" starting up PoserPro2012.

Uninstalled and reinstalled it ONLY as a 64bit version - no error after starting PoserPro2012.

So this is working - but i've got another problem now.

Trying to render a full scene in firefly mode, after being finished with the render, the rendered image gets overwritten immidiately with a simple grey color. So - the rendered image is gone ... It works in the 'area render' mode - but not the full render mode ...

I've filed a ticket to the Smith Micro support about this - so waiting now for a response ...

Everything else working fine - except this render problem (... which is quite a problem, because if there is no finished render left, then why should i set up a scene  ;-) ... (it's working fine in my Poser Pro 2010 all the time).

Otherwise i mainly use Poser to set up figures/objects to be used in Vue - so right now, not too much of a problem for me, still - i would like to see a fix for this sometimes :-)  - but reading through other posts  here in the forum, it works fine for other users.

If you're looking for more digging / raising control, for instance, if you don't want to dig (or raise) deeper (higher) than a certain depth (height), than you can use the button "Altitude" in the '2D' brush mode area.
Next to this button there is another small symbol called 'eye dropper'.
By selecting the eye dropper, you will see a partially transparent layer appearing in your terrain.

Now if you click at a certain height in your terrain, you will set a new fixed height, at which your digging (if this layer will be below you digging) or terrain raising (if this layer will be higher than your raising surface) will be stopped, if needed ...
( Or you can directly input a value in the data field next to the eye dropper symbol, to position this invisible digging or raising limit ).

The new fast and powerful graphic cards always require a connection to a strong power supply and because of the need to have a good cooling system installed, they all cover two slots.

If your computer is outdated in the above mentioned needed components, then i, too, would recommend to spare money for a newer computer system.

Maybe in the Vue developement future (what i really hope for) there will be some implementation of CUDA (Nvidia special) support - meaning, that certain functions (maybe even supporting the render process) will be calculated by the much faster GPU units of newer graphic cards ...

... by the way ... my Vue 8.5 Infinite runs great on my very good OS Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit ... Win XP gave me a lot of problems with many different things in the past (problems with other stuff, not Vue ), which worked a lot better with Windows Vista - and now even better with Win 7 ... ( Win XP -  last time installed 3 years ago and wiped off our home PCs and not missing it since then in any way - and i like to play good games, too )

Have you tried the tipp from Peggy, to run the downloader or the install-exe by rightclicking first on those exe-files and choose "..run as administrator..." ?

I'm running a 64bit system Win Vista and now Win 7 since over three years, i've barely never ran into problems with all those programs i run and tested - about 97 % of them working, the rest not working weren't important ones.
And Vue never gave me a problem since then.
I myself started with Vue 5 Esprit at the end of 2005 and since then i've got all the sidegrades up to Vue 8 Infinite.
All installations were working fine, just being asked about the serial key of the version before and then it installed without a problem.

The only problem i ran into about two times while downloading the install files (with different installers, maybe like with Vue 5 and Vue 7), that those download files were corrupted and i had to repeat the downloads. But that could be caused by loosing the i-connection for a moment while downloading.

To control the lighting of the shadows in the described method by wabe is the easy way to go, while using any of the available lighting models (like standard, global illumination, ...).

If you calculate with the Global Radiosity lighting model selected.
This already lightens up the shadows more naturally, because here in your case, it renders the light which in reality will be reflected from the house wall paint or ground colors.
And - right next to the Global Radiosity switch is a data field called 'Gain'.
Raising the value there for instance from 0.00 to 1.00 or some higher or lower, will influence, how much brighter or darker the shadows will be calculated.

To switch between the one or the other mode you use 'Show Gizmos' under menue 'Display -> Gizmos ->.... ' .

'Show Gizmo Helpers' only switches on or off the little buttons P, L , G , V and buttons move, rotate, scale - top right corner of the gizmo.

If it's still not working - does it always work with other object formats like OBJ or 3DS or LWO or DAE for  instance ??

If you grab the real good freeware paint program called 'Paint.Net', you can use a quite good working cartoon-effect on images.

You can find it in Paint.Net :

'Effects'-menue  ---> Artistic ---> Ink Sketch ...

The image can be adjusted using two sliders, controlling the strength of the colors and the ink outlines.

Don't know if this could be useful to you - anyway - here are some examples:

If you know your way around in Vue, you can achieve a close looking environment like in Avatar movie - especially those floating rocks and the mist and clouds hovering around.
Gill did a good job in her render - but for sure, she can get even closer and closer to the movie look, putting more work into it.

Anyway - they didn't use Vue in the Avatar movie, because they've programmed a system, which was capable of growing plants instantly and interacting and influencing each other ... because they needed this for a real time movie and not a still.
So the requirements for landscape and plant design were totally different and Vue, as nice stuff you can do with it, wouldn't fit in the pipeline.

Sure, i can't and don't know either, what programs they've used, i've just read a few detailed articles about it and there was never Vue mentioned in there.
Vue could've been used for quick pre-screening purposes in early developement stages, who knows - but maybe in the future there will be more information available in this matter.