Have you thought of using Vue Infinite and the VueSync for CINEMA 4D plug-in instead?

Sorry, but can creating a new build be an automatic process? The development team has to fix some bugs and then create a build at that point, presumably the build undergoes some QA, after which an update is signed off for release.

Planetary Option checked

No other changes

Planetary Option unchecked

It was the first time I've ever rendered the top camera, I never normally use it either! I was trying to find out what was happening as the OpenGL views stop showing anything useful if "use planetary terrains" in the options is checked.

Well I managed to fix the Top camera by just raising it up, so that was a mistake on my part.

BUT it doesn't alter the fact that the OpenGL views are unusable if "use planetary terrains" is checked in the options.

Edit: I have posted 2 screenshots to illustrate this below.

Contrast this with Side Effect Software, who, even though I am using the non commercial version which obviously doesn't include support, respond to my bug reports and frequently have a fix next day!

Another thing that could be improved when working with materials is the size of the Material Editor's layer list. Why is it so small! Please can we eliminate the unnecessary scrolling.

I would like to see multi-core used for Ecosystem population, which is currently my biggest bottleneck.

The plants are in need of a serious update. There are far too few plants, particularly high resolution one. They need a much much bigger variety of plants, like you will get with the forethcoming Xfrog bundle for Vue.

I think that smallspace idea for automatic river and lake generation based on topology would be amazing.

A VueSync plugin for modo should surely come soon, but maybe before the 11 upgrade.

At some stage the entire GUI needs a complete rethink. It is very clunky compared to any modern application.

They really need to get a grip on the stability issues. Vue is the least stable application that I use!

I am also evaluating Vue (Vue 10 Infinite PLE) together with Terragen 2.

I thought of evaluating XStream, but as my main app is CINEMA 4D, which is incredibly stable, it seemed better to go down the compositing route...

With XStream Vue my understanding from skimming through the reference documentation is that Vue handles the Vue elements of the render, Maya handles its own objects. To allow you to interact with Vue objects in Maya the Vue plug-in creates Maya proxies for Vue objects.

So far my initial impression of Vue are:

The Ecosystem tool and painting is amazing.

Atmospheres are very good, great for sunsets, sunrises, clouds...

Provided you use procedural terrains near the camera the results can be very realistic and with the sculpting tools make both standard and procedural terrains easy to manipulate.

The GUI is very poor, a modern single tabbed window interface like C4D / Houdini / Maya / modo would be much more artist friendly. In particular the modeless dialogs are very dated and require an excess amount of mouse clicking.

It needs much better multi-threading, for example in C4D or Houdini when you render to the Render Picture Viewer continue to work in the main app whilst it is rendering. This is not possible in Vue, you can't even access any of the functionality of the picture view.

It is not very stable (on Mac OS X 10.6.8!

You could also look at Planetside Terragen as an alternative to Vue with the XFrog bundle it is a very interesting package. The free non-commercial edition allows you to render stills upto 800 x 600 with no watermark. Definitely a must try.

Most of these programs have demos or non commercial versions. She should download them and find out what works for her. Every artist is different. One size does not fit all.

If she is planning to purchase a commercial version she should also look at the license agreements. Some are a lot more flexible than others.

In particular the CINEMA 4D licensing is much more flexible than Maya or 3D Max, in particular you are allowed to resell it. Not the case with Autodesk products.

Another criteria might be that it should be possible to run the software on Windows or OS X with no penalty for switching.

If you can master one piece of software it is quite easy and often rewarding to learn another.