At present Elements 7 is on sale at about $87.

Thank you for your response.

I talked to the people at Adobe but they have a vested interest in selling the most expensive program they can get away with selling so input from someone who isn't working for them is much appreciated.

The problem is that I've recently upgraded from Vue 6 Pro Studio to Vue 7 complete.  That's sort of scrunched my sofware budget.  Since I'm a hobbyist and not a professional I usually do try to find cheaper solutions.  I'd decided that for the main work I needed serious programs and I can't find anything that will out perform Vue for landscapes.
   I may eventually grow to the point where a full version of Photoshop is necessary for my higher demands but I really don't want to expend that kind of money if I'm not going to be using the features.

Love your avatar. :)

No, Carrera 7 has a water object that's just listed as "Ocean" in the insert menu.  It's not very big, so not really much of an ocean, I expect that it's best used for filling swimming pools and bathtubs.

My first attempt at water I inserted a water object.  Last time I inserted an infinite plane and used a water mat.  Not sure what was going on last night.  May have a memory problem since it  seems to have disapeared today.

Been there, done that.  I can understand why they buy up sites with domain names close to their main one.  Geekatplay didn't and I accidentally ended up at a porn site.

Only problem I've found was when I tried to update to Poser 7 SR3.  With SR3 objects Vue has trouble finding parts of the grouping.  I went back to SR2 and have had no problems.
With SR3 Poser went from saving relative file paths in it's scene files to saving the full file path.  Since Vue 6 was set up for the relative paths it can't read SR3 scenes correctly.
That's the only problem I've ever had with Poser imports to Vue.

How does applying a fog or cloud material to a primitive work out?  It should be less overhead than a metacloud and you shouldn't end up with symetrical edges if you use a course bump map.

In my defence it's actually one of a few programs that don't at least ask if you want an autosearch for content.
Can you repose characters within Carrara or are you better off setting up the figure elements within DAZ?

My appologys for being so silly.  I sort of assumed that since they reside in the same directory structure and Carrara is supposed to handle DAZ content that DAZ would have it do an automatic add for DAZ content.

Note to self, never, ever assume even the most logical of things!

Thank you for your help.

Thanks for the tip, thefixer.  I'll have to try exporting the rock or whatever item I need to pose on or against.  Seems I've been doing it the hard way.
   Like the others I work back and forth between Poser and Vue rather than trying to do posing in Vue. 
     If you don't believe that Vue does a more realistic render try rendering V4 Elite Marie.  Her darkest skin tone in Vue comes out a nice extremely dark skin tone.  In Poser the same texture comes out a sort of muddy red brown.

I'll agree with the above post.  Lighting is not only key but one of the hardest things to do correctly.  I'll sometimes spend as long or longer balancing lights as I do setting up the scene.  Setting up a set of lights in Vue that's similar to the Poser 3 light set isn't hard though if that's what you want.
     In general you should find that Vue lighting is easier to do and that the combination of Vue lighting and the Vue render engine produces much more realistic results.

Did the test.  Doesn't matter whether you actually conform conforming hair to the figure or parent it.  Must be something different in the files defining the hair or clothing items when they aren't conforming items.