A New Computer! Uhh ...

Steve K

I finally signed up for a year of VUE & Plant Factory at $99, and got all the programs and content downloaded.  Something like 15GB, took a couple of days on my antique DSL line.  But it looks good, the AMD 12 core/24 thread chip does some pretty fast renders, e.g. a nice 5 sec desert flythru at 1280x720, 24 fps in about 20 minutes.  That is workable for the 48 Hour Film Contest.  The "Animation Wizard" works better than I remember from my older versions, and the included content (~10GB scenes, objects, atmospheres, etc.) is pretty cool, some stuff I would have paid for. 

My first paid  subscription software ... 

WendyLuvsCatz

just don't become dependent on it 

enjoy it while you can but be prepared to walk away from it and not keep bleeding money when you are too busy etc

whenever I sign up for something especially 30day trials, life gets in my way and I end up wasting the opportunity and cannot get it back, this happened with Marvellous Designer, I had big real life dramas left right and centre and never even got to look at it.

SileneUK

Steve K said:

No, the hobby version of VUE does not export, but I can with my 2016 VUE Complete.  Yes, Xara is a very good, affordable program, I use it for a monthly newsletter, having replaced the discontinued Adobe PageMaker a few years back.  I had kept an old Win XP laptop to run Pagemaker for a long time.  I have Adobe Photoshop CS 5 and am glad I can avoid the subscription.  My wife & I also use Photoshop Elements which is pretty full featured for well under $100, no subscription. 

Thanks, Steve, that is good to know about Xara, I am going to sign up.  Silene

Steve K

WendyLuvsCatz said:

just don't become dependent on it 

enjoy it while you can but be prepared to walk away from it and not keep bleeding money when you are too busy etc

Yes, my thoughts exactly.  In the case of VUE, it looks like they are adding new content every quarter or so, so maybe I'll be getting something worth the cost.  And like I said, I've got a lot of great VUE content from years past, items unlike anything else and a lot of which have disappeared from the market.

 

Dartanbeck

I must say... I'm absolutely loving my new computer build!

Much more modest than yours:

• Ryzen 2700 lowest end version 8 core
• 64GB RAM
• 6GB GTX 1660

Carrara loves it and Daz Studio seems to be getting along with it okay too.

Steve K

Dartanbeck said:

I must say... I'm absolutely loving my new computer build!

Much more modest than yours:

• Ryzen 2700 lowest end version 8 core
• 64GB RAM
• 6GB GTX 1660

Carrara loves it and Daz Studio seems to be getting along with it okay too.

Great, sounds good.  Carrara has always offered fast animation rendering if you avoid the high end settings.  But VUE was always slow with any reasonably good settings.  I'm really glad the new AMD CPU's make it much more reasonable for many VUE projects, and almost all Carrara projects.