Attached Link: http://www.ericsmit.com/video/rendering-tests-a.zip

As you all know I'm not very excited with the upcoming POSER animation import for VUE 4. I don't think that VUE's rendering engine is adequate for rendering animations. POSER 4 users will only loose time by rendering their animations in VUE 4. When I say "loose time", I really mean it. The animation rendering quality is not better and you can multiply the rendering time by 10. As I'm an honest guy, I did 2 tests with my 3D softwares : VUE 4.06, POSER 4 pro pack and Cinema 4D XL 7.3. The first test is a rotating cube and the second a camera rotating around a poser character (imported directly in C4DXL 7 and VUE 4 whitout doing any material editing). You can download these tests at the link above (6 Mb zip file). It's a Quiktime movie. All the details are included with it. These are not "true" comparative tests. It's impossible to reproduce exactly the same light set-up, and the rendering engines are totally different. The motion are not totally identical. Sorry, I was a bit lazy.... Anyway, these tests can only give you an idea of what to expect from these softwares. One of the most important part of these tests is the rendering time... watch carefully all the animations, and make your conclusions ! The first test was an easy job for the 3 softwares. I only did it to show you that VUE 4 can produce very good animations with simple shapes. In fact, VUE 4 was the only one that could render the bump map correctly (although it's slightly off axis). But it needed too much time : more than 10 minutes instead of 3 minutes for C4DXL7 and 4 minutes for POSER4. The second test is much more interesting : VUE 4 needed 1 HOUR 30 MINUTES to render the animation ! POSER 4 did the job in 15 minutes, while the incredible C4DXL7 in only 7 minutes. And the VUE animation is whitout any doubts the worse ! The only one that could be used for compositing and editing is the C4DXL7 animation (but that's not a surprise...) You should know that I worked more on the lighting of the VUE 4 animation than for the other softwares... And, in theory, I used better rendering quality settings in VUE 4 than in C4DXL7. 1 hour 30 minutes is definitely too long. For an animation in NTSC format (640x480 pixels / 30 frames per seconds) with trees, terrains, clouds and volumetric light be ready for 30 minutes of rendering for each frame (even with a fast processor). A 10 minutes animation would take 540 000 minutes to render. That's 375 days, more than a year ! And, I'm not sure that you would be pleased with the results.... If you want to render still images of static POSER scenes in a "natural" environment, then VUE 4 is surely the perfect tool. But for animations... :) Eric