As for me, all versions of Vue including 5 Infinite run on an older ATI Radeon 7500C...YMMV

Well, exactly. 1 hour per frame is way too long for animation purposes -- just multiply it out.

Suppose you want to do a 5 minute short (which incidentally I have done using Poser and Vue). If it took 1 hour per frame:

5 minute movie x 60 seconds per minute = 300 seconds
300 seconds x 30 fps = 9000 frames
9000 frames x 1 hour per frame = 9000 hours
9000 hours / 24 hours per day = 375 days

So that means rendering 24 hours a day for more than a year to get a 5 minute movie. Nobody has that much patience, not even the pro studios.

1 minute per frame is more like it, and unless you have a render farm that means rendering smaller images with fewer effects. There are other tricks to cut time without sacrificing too much quality. Once I wanted to render a volumetric sunset with a soaring eagle. Rendering every frame with full effects would have taken 6 days for the 5 second sequence, if I remember correctly. But I rendered the volumetric atmosphere once, so the first frame took an hour. Then I set up that image as a background and superimposed the soaring bird over it. The remaining 149 frames only took another hour and you couldn't tell the difference from doing it the long way.

In any case I'm sure you'll have fun with Vue 5 once you get it, whether for stills or animations. I know I do! :-)

Whether more memory speeds up a render depends on the complexity of your scene. If a scene can be processed within the limits of real memory (as opposed to being swapped out to virtual / disk memory) then having more won't speed up that particular scene. 1GB is a good amount to begin with; experiment with it before deciding whether you need more based on the types of scenes you want to make.

Decent-quality animations are certainly possible with the horsepower you've got. You'll soon get a feel for the tradeoffs e.g. if you render with volumetric atmospheres, global radiosity, procedural terrains, models with high poly counts and lots of blurred transparency and reflection effects, then animations are going to take ages on almost any machine short of a supercomputer. You'll probably find you can scale back on the effects and still get good animations. Keep in mind that some Pixar movies were done using scanline rendering and shadow maps -- not even ray tracing.

Regarding Poser and Mimic -- Vue won't import the soundtrack from Poser, just the animated model. You'll have to composite the sound back in using a video editor.

With a little work on the image map, the blending of the noise node and the UV mapping, I hope you can use this idea to create the effect you're looking for.

The contrail effect is mostly created by the Lines noise node that's connected to the Transparency in the function editor.

We don't have much control over how the pattern is repeated because it's a noise node. So try replacing it with an image map consisting of a fuzzy, thin horizontal black line on a white background. Vue repeats the image map across the sky, but you can adjust the UV scale to achieve a single contrail like the above example.

What cloud pattern do you have loaded in your atmosphere? This looks like the "Busy Aliens" pattern. "Airplane Trails" is a lot more subtle.

(To change the pattern, go to the Atmosphere editor, select Clouds, right click the preview picture to load a material, and look under Clouds - Other Clouds.)

Attached Link: http://www.curiouslabs.com/article/articleview/1384/1/595/

...and even then, some models link the bump map in the Material room to the Gradient_Bump node, and require you to manually disconnect and move it over to the Bump node.

*"Yeah, poseur is the big hair band kind of attitude"*What are you saying, that I have big hair? :-)

FWIW, I also just placed a Poser 6 upgrade order and it went through first time, no problem. Here's some tips for using the CL/DR store based on my prior experiences: * Enable cookies in your browser * If you get an error message during your order, wait 24 hours to retry * While waiting to retry, delete any cookies for www.digitalriver and shop.digitalriver so you start again with a clean slate * If you're claiming the $50 rebate, the customer service person told me to click the link in the rebate notification email. Don't paste it into your browser or try to go to the store directly and type in the rebate code. Apparently the email has some hidden HTML that authorizes the rebate, even though you still have to type in the rebate code. (This screwed me up the first time I used the store, resulting in a 24-hour wait...) * Don't worry about the warnings that you only get one try to use a rebate code. If you mess up, wait 24 hours and try again. The code is only used up once the order goes through successfully. * If your credit card uses your middle initial or middle name, be sure to include it in the "First name" field when they ask for your address. Otherwise your card may not validate and you'll have to retry in 24 hours. (This happened to me when I retried my first order -- another 24-hour wait). * For upgrades, be sure to include the "XF" at the start of your serial number. As noted previously, the "XF" prefix does not appear in Poser 4's About screen. (This one I got right :-)

When I bought Shade 7 from CL's DigitalRiver store I had problems like this. Their customer service person advised that if I got an error message about serial numbers or credit card problems during my order, I needed to wait 24 hours before attempting to place the order again. It's apparently due to the draconian security measures they use to validate orders. Eventually I got it to take my order and I'm now a happy Shade user. So for those of you trying several times per day with no luck, I suggest waiting 24 hours before you try again. I must say I haven't experienced such annoying behaviour with any other online store, and like the earlier poster I agree it seems you have to practically beg them to take your money. But be patient and your order should eventually go through.

Attached Link: http://www.robinwood.com/Catalog/Technical/PoserTuts/PoserPages/PoserSuperImpGraphics.html

Attached Link: http://www.stereoeye.jp/software/index_e.html

There's no easy way to create a 3D image from an existing 2D image or movie because the depth information is simply not there. There are ways to add it manually but they are extremely time consuming (i.e. you're dreaming :-).

Here is a good, step-by-step Face Room tutorial: http://www.dancingbadger.com/poser/faceroom00.html

I find the injected dials never show up as long as the body part being injected is active. You have to inject the morph, select some other body part, then go back to the one being morphed and the dials will then be there. This may be a P5 quirk but the workaround seems to work for me.