A simple question...I hope, If you have one surface over top of another and both surfaces are assigned a texture, does VUE render both surfaces or only the surface that is visible? Reason that I am asking is that I have a large job to render for animation, and it has lots of overlapping surfaces. Will the rendering be slow if I assign textures to each surface and then let VUE render, or should I trim off the excess underlying surfaces to save on rendering time? Thanks, JoeK

You should be able to select under render options to only render visible surfaces. This should cut down on your render time.

The VUE option is "Only Visible Layers". As per the HELP file, I read that to mean that if only part of the layer is visible, it will render the whole layer whether its polygons are visible to the camera or not. Has anyone looked into this - would I be better off spending time deleting hidden polygons, or will VUE waste rendering time rendering hidden polygons?

This is why grouping objects by location is so important when rendering really complex scenes. If View discovers that the group is not visable in the final render it will ignore the entire group in the render, It will speeding it up lots.

Hi surveyman, Vue will need the memory (RAM) for both surfaces, but only the top-most surface will be rendered (i.e. will eat up rendering time)--unless, of course, it is transparent. ta, -Sascha.rb

Thanks Sascha, that's the answer I was looking for. Cheers, JoeK