I'm a Poser 5 user and I'm considering purchasing Vue 4 Pro. I hope some information for the decision: 1) Someone told me that V4P is very unstable; it crash often so is very difficult working with it. Its true? 2) I read that V4P now import Poser 5 dynamic hair. Whats the quality of import? 3) Does V4P import materials from Poser 5: does it import skin shader? And displacement map? 4) Whats the quality of V4P lighting system? The one of P5 isnt great, this is one matter of my idea of purchasing V4P. I hope I was clear: Im Italian and my English isnt perfect! Thank for the help.

marco-xxx; (1)Perhaps. There seems to be a small core of users who simply can not use it. That said, there have been a lot of patches and bug fixes since the release, and the number of people who enjoy it has grown considerably. And then there are us smartasses who have had a stable install from the word go.... ;) (2)The import quality of the dynamic hair and cloth is excellent. Go to www.belino.net (home of Phoul), and find the 'Judy Walking' clip. That is a quicky demo of what the dynamic cloth and hair look like in an animation (requires Mover 5) (3)VuePro doesn't support the Poser shader system or displacement maps at this time; well, except for the anisiotropic shader for the dynamic hair (that gives the rendered hair the highlights). (4) Also an excellent lighting system...although not on a level with Maya or Lightwave. VuePro doesn't have true global illumination or HDRI, but there are some freebie light sets out there that do a fair job of simulating GI. There is -far- more control over the lighting in Vue than in Poser. And your English was fine... ;)

Ive taken a look at it on a friends computer, as he already purchased it... I was kinda disappointed... The export feature does not really work, all I saw was error messages that I was not allowed to export a scene or it resulted in useless crap... I still miss a modeler, maybe just a FEW more options than with the vue primitives... In my eyes the export feature was the only reason to get the Pro, but as it doesnt really work... :(

Were the scene exports =strictly= Vue content? They have blocks established so that, for example, Poser content can not be exported into another format through VuePro. This was done to prevent them from getting into legal trouble via the DMCA and a couple of other new laws...

I dunno, for very small objects made from primitives it worked I must admit, but for scene exporting I got dozens of errors and nothing or just crap was the result... I tried with many of my scenes, all self-made and none of them containing poser elements and absolutely no "external" objects, no 3ds objects, nothing... Just vue and my self-made textures... I tried about 4 or 5 scenes and I got many errors, but no result... We agreed to stop trying... To say at least something positive: Poser 5 import works good - the figures look just great... He doesnt have Mover 5, so we didnt try poser animation, but I heard it also works good...

The only thing Vuepro does better is blurs, poser import updating in vue4pro, and the cows might be better. Is this worth the extra 400. No way.

For me it would easily be worth the money if I could export my scenes to 3ds or others... I had already some folks asking me about it, but vue is and stays just vue...

Check out the comparative chart from e-on here: http://www.e-onsoftware.com/Products/vueproductline/index.php There's a lot more to Vue Pro than "blurs", Poser imports and better cows. Personnaly, I think it's worth the extra $400. I am also one of those who had no stability issues. BTW, haegerst, exports seem to work fine for me (although the trees don't export their animation which is sad). Did you try it with one of the latest updates? I think they improved the exports in 4.5.2

No, its already some months ago, Im not sure which version it was, but it was NO beta version, so I was kinda disappointed... Maybe Ill bug Chris to apply all updates and well try again once more, but at the moment I just dont have the time... Now, that would finally be worth 400 bucks for me, if that damned feature finally worked...

I've noticed alot people having problems with Vue. One of the main things I found out was Vue uses alot of memory and processor power. Some suggestions to those having problems with crashes is to open your taskmanager and shut down anything you don't need (at least while using Vue). I found out after doing this I don't get anymore crashes, also I'm operating it on an onboard video chip so you don't need the best video card to run Vue. When it comes to rendering animation just check out www.belino.net pretty amazing. If you want to speed things up create yourself a network. I rendered a 3 second scene at 1600 X 1200 and played it on a 51 inch widescreen and was amazed at the quality, every bit as high as a Pixar animation. It took 24 hrs on a P1.5 640k memory. I was impressed. Even at Pixar it takes anywhere from 6 to 12 hours to render one frame for final production and the have an extremely powerful network farm. Vue by far is the easiest software to figure out without a manual, combine it with poser and you can do pretty amazing things.