I kinda' came across this just now.

E-On software has released Vue 6 Personal Learning Edition.

Basically Vue lets you do certain things programs like 3DS Max & Maya has a lot of problem with. Like forests. In Vue, you'd create a new scene, add a landscape, like a mountain or something, apply an Eco system, like the aforementioned forest, to it; and it will automatically populate the landscape with appropriately scattered trees. Not a 2D textures of trees, mind you, but actual honest-to-goodness 3D trees.

The thing is, at full detail, you might be looking at a few billion polygons; something that would bring Max, or Maya to a crashing halt. Vue, on the other hand, gets on by just fine.

So... basically, you can open up Vue, quickly set up a scene, export the image, and use it as a background for something you're rendering in Blender.

Anyways, you can check out [link] to see some of the work created using Vue.

And then, you can grab it from: [link]
(If the link gives you any troubles you'll need to request a download link from [link])