I would say lighting and texturing are the most important things. one quick trick is to use image based lighting, but vue isnt very good at that.

Had I given it more time vue could have done better than any of those other ones. vue's radiosity engine is really pretty good with indoor scenes in my opinion.

sweet. I kind of wish I had had more time to work on those. the people from lighwave are showing us up.

those images didnt use IBL, but its a nice technique for realistic renders some times. as for indoor renders, the trick is to boost the gain on the radiosity. I just figured this out a few weeks ago. and then I suppose if you looking for somthing like the vray renders set the quality to maximum.

Im going to say that the closest vue can get to that is with image based lighting. a feature that consistently makes it crash by the way.

are you in vista? if so, run vue as administraitor.

I dont know, but make shure that its rendering to the disk. othe rwise its rendering to nothing.

or you could go out and rent a supercomputer form a lab some where.

there is no perfict computer. most of the problems I have are vues fault. your set up seems about right.

I have two computers, one a cheap laptop, the other a really nice desktop, and they both seem to render at he same speed. I think that you might look into 64 bit prossesors if you want somthing to go fast. but yes, ram is important too

what in particular are you looking for?

vue to the best of my knowledge cannot do most of this. the parts with rain hitting the water or running down surfaces are just not possible. these effects are hard to achieve even in top programs like 3d max. I my self how ever would try to go at the other part in post production. places like http://www.animationsforvideo.com/html/overlay_effects.htm can give you a what you need.

there are still many ways to make something like that. I think there are some tutorials about complex terrain formations on this site.

vue will how ever will be slightly tricky to install on vista. some settings have not worked, and I still have to remind it to run as administrator. but that may just be me.

cool wierd juice seems to be the best bet here. Ill try it out. Now Im just wondering what the people who make the water falls in cornacopia use.