Howdy.  I am new to the Vue community because I am new to Vue.  I have been waiting for Vue 7 Esprit to come out before making the plunge.  It coincided with Christmas, so, I had my Second Life Avatar buy it for me for a Christmas present.  Actually, I had made some money in Second Life over the years, selling art, playing music, creating clothes, etc, so, I took some of my hard earned Linden Dollars and put them in a paypal account and bought Vue. 

Second Life is what actually got me into content creation and 3D modeling four years ago.  I was a little frustrated by the proprietary nature of the product, so, I then moved to Multiverse which is another MMORPG gaming engine that supported Collada import.  This led to a couple year long plunge into Blender and then last year into Poser Pro.  I have been really trying my hand at many things in Poser including animation.  It turns out I am much more interested in creating 3D content than I am in 3D gaming.  So, that has led to my purchase of Vue.

Which leads to my first Vue forum question (and certainly not my last) about how people use Vue and Poser together.  I have become very familiar with Poser and with my Blender experience 3D modeling in general.  When I first got Vue, I figured that I would utilize it by importing Poser content into it and then use Vue to generate the 3D Natural Environment.  I thought I would do all my rendering in Vue.

One thing I noticed right away with this approach is the need for RAM.  In order to take advantage of this in a normal work flow (i.e. wanting to be able to pose figures), I would need to run Vue with Poser enabled which runs them both together.  Currently being RAM challenged (2G), I started to wonder if this made sense.  On the flip side, I didn't want to have to constantly go back to Poser and change a pose and then reimport either.  The other alternative I thought might be to use Vue to create basically a set of Matte paintings for Poser and do the rendering in Poser.  I am not sure if this is the best approach now either.  Hence, the post.

I would love to hear about everyone's experience and advice on the Vue and Poser work flow.

Thanks and hi again!

IF you choose to pose in vue then yes, you need heaps of ram.  On the other hand, if you pose in Poser, import into VUE then everytime you adjust the pose in Poser all you have to do is save your poser file and VUE will automatically update it----no need to re-import.  This will save you on the ram side.  On the other hand, by posing in Poser, depending on your scene, you will have to play around with having your figure interact with VUE objects because they will not be displayed in Poser.

Anything else you wanna know?  Just ask away

I pose in exactly the way Gary just said, I have 8 Gigs of RAM and would still not choose to pose inside Vue, simply because it's crap at it, and that's no reflection on Vue, it's just as it is, it wasn't really designed for that and IMO it's a feature they shouldn't have bothered with.

As for Poser peeps interacting with Vue objects, If there's no Poser equivalent that I can use and there usually is, but if there isn't, I'll save the Vue object in a format that Poser can use [3ds, wav, obj etc] then take it into Poser, adjust the character to react to it and then just load the Poser peep into Vue by itself and use the proper Vue object in Vue!
Works for me!

Welcome to your new wallet draining, time sucking new addiction [ROFL].
Whatever life you had before has gone!!! 

I also do exactly as stated before, and I also have 8GB. It's a very convenient and fast workflow, once you get used to it.

Regarding the question of render in Poser or Vue, there's no doubt that Vue is much better. Your idea of rendering the background in Vue and exporting it to Poser has many problems. Just the complication of making the light in Poser to exactly match the light in the background, this alone is a sufficiently strong reason not to do it. It will always look fake, unless you work a lot on each image just for this purpose. Wasted time. And many, many scenes you just couldn't do in this way. I don't want to advertise my images, but take just a look at my latest image and think how this image could be done in this way, I mean prepare the background in Vue and render in Poser. I would say it's very very difficult because the environment around the characters is not just a background, it's an environment, all around the characters. Link here:
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1806409

Depending on the complexity of your scenes, I would really recommend getting more RAM and getting a 64 bit system. You will not regret it.

But all this above depends very much on what kind of scenes you want to make. If all you want to do is portraits, I would say you really don't need Vue all that much. For portraits, IMO, Vue is a nice-to-have, not a must-have. For portraits only, you could use Poser or, maybe even better, Daz Studio.

Welcome to Vue :)

(I used ot play Everquest I and II, and Hellgate London, MMOs)

I have two tutorials, convenientaly linked in my signature ;) that deal with Poser to Vue import and 64 bit systems, which are probably worth your reading (and my lighting tutorial, lighting is mondo important)

a) Folk are right, jsut repose inside Poser, not Vue, save file, and it iwll update throught o Vue ;)

b) Only AFTER the pose is correct, tweak materials, to save hassles. Getting materials right, makes things a lot better.

c) Save the object as a Vue object, .vob format, and then import that version into your scene. Reason being is that Vue, like most aps, can use it's own format objects more efficiently.

D) 64 bit systems with 4 or more gigs of memoery helps a TON. you can work on far more complex scenes, check my gallery, no way you could do some of that (*) with less than 4 gig of RAM as many of scenes don't use ecosystems, but individual objects

(*) short of compositing, which is a nightmare.

Vue comes with 64 bit version as well as normal 32 bit.

:)

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.