Hi
I have Vue 5 at the minute and have always been less than impressed at MY ability to produce good scenes with it compared to say terragen.  I was able to pick up the free version of Terragen 0.9 and produce some amazing landscapes. I know in the right hands Vue can maybe match Terragen but how about for the average user? Images I produce using  Vue5  always seem to have a kind of grain on them and I've noticed this in other gallery images.  Does Vue6 deliver any noticeable render quality over Vue 5? Maybe someone could render a Vue5 image and the same one in Vue6 to compare. With the immenent release of Terragen 2 I'm thinking of by-passing Vue 6 altogether. 
To cover all types of renderings,  the packages I use the most are Poser and Cararra but neither do landscapes particulary well so I'm left with teh choice of Vue6 or Terragen 2. Now if Cararra did fantastic landscapes then it would be the ultimate all-rounder...
Any thoughts?

Terregen 2 will NOT import PZ3's.  I already asked.  So your Poser stuff would have to be imported the old Bryce way via OBJ & then apply textures separately(ICCKKK).  Vue6 has added clouds/terrain brushes/displacement/SSS/transluceny/eco-painting, although some of these items are not fully functional yet & won't be till final release IIRC.   So far from what I've seen the Vue renderer has vastly improved - new lighting models etc etc.  I've been playing with V6I for a couple weeks & love it....will love it even more when it becomes stable, as it stillis in pre-release.

I have Carrara & I think it does landscapes very well - it has most of the same features Vue has just presented in a different manner(displacement/SSS/trans/GI/GR/AO/Clouds), in addition to all the plugins you can accumulate help out a lot.

For vast landscapes I might suggest World Machine or Geo-Control( I prefer the latter) those top Vue & C combined IMHO. Those can be imported into either program inc. Terregen.

Well, like anything else there are trade-offs. I just downloaded TG as well. (I have Vue 4 DEsprit as my other terrain generator.) TG looks to have a baddly designed interface and I expect to be struggling with its learning curve. Vue, conversely, is intuative to get started with right out of the box without opening the manual. But I agree, Vue is difficult to achieve photorealistic results, at least with version the 4 that I have. But if they ever want to compete with Bryce and Vue and sell Terragen, then they had better put a better inteface on it.