This may be covered in the manual but the program wont be here for 2 more days, and I need to know now :) anyway how do you keep the polygon number down?? Is grouping one way? Here is a scene I did yesterday but the polygons are out of this world!! Thank you, Shiollie Ps.. could also use some pointers on the scene.

Personal opinion (no technical garanty ;) ) Don't take into account the number of polygons Vue gives,it is an approximation ! If your scene includes some terrains and quite a number of trees, the polygon count can raise to a Very high level BUT as long as you use Vue elements (primitives, terrains, trees, etc,..) Vue will 'digest those polys rather easily ! (even if it is written in red... scenes with over 10 million polys are frequent..) Strangely, it is not the same if you import meshes from outside Vue so beware you might need to 'decimate' the imported objs... (you can decimate with Vue Pro ...) To keep the poly count lowest as possible: Far away elements can be very low in polys Background mountain terrain resolution can be kept low (256/256)when you resize them, the polygon count does not change.. Distant trees can be faked using alphaplanes (see Thomaskrahn's excellent tutorial..) Use highly-detailed imported objects only if you need to see them close (grouping objs do not change the number of polys) hope that helps a little (your image looks very nice !) Paul

A sure fire way to reduce the polygon count is to use alpha planes. Create parts of the scene using the "White Back" atmosphere under Others. Add the items you want, rocks, trees, etc. and then delete the ground plane. Render in Final mode. Save out the resulting, rendered picture as two files: an image file and an alpha file. Load the atmosphere you want and select an Alpha Plane object. Use your rendered picture as the "Color picture" and alpha picture as the "Alpha Picture". Invert the alpha picture to give it a white background. Click OK and render. It's easy to reduce a 100K polygon tree to 4 polygons using this method although it takes a little practice to get lighting and camera angles just right. There's more info. in the manual on page 94. It's a little difficult to explain in words but hope this helps.