I'm trying to build a piece of terrain about 10 miles long... I'm planning to populate it with buildings, flora, and people, so I want the scale to be such that I can really get in there.

Is this unreasonable? Or rather, if I started out with 1 of those units of terrain, is THAT a dumb way to go?

In the end, will it make more sense to use 1 unit to get the overall shape and then fake specific shots with bits and pieces built for those specific camera angles?

I know this is all kind of vague... I have no clue as to what I'm doing, just learning this program, if it isn't obvious...

Any suggestion greatly appreciated.

One of the big things I think you're going to run into right off the bat is that that kind of a scene is going to be a HUGE memory hog, and though Vue's memory system is very efficient with most objects you're going to run into a barrier at some point, probably not even close to the whole ten mile stretch. The new Vue 5 infinate shows promise for solving some of these problems but I don't know how much of e-on's hype will pan out, and probably won't know until people start actually using the program and giving out feedback. Anyway, I would suggest doing individual shots with high detail and skip trying to do the whole thing as one, just my opinion though.

I suspected that it might pan out that way... Thanks.

In Vue 4 things are made harder by the bug whereby Vue reports completely fictitious sizes for imported meshes. I'm currently working with a scene that's maybe a few km across. I use a scale of one imported mesh = about 3 m. One guide rod in the scene and one guide rod in each imported object allows me to match things up.

When you say guide rod, what exactly do you mean? Are you creating objects in each element that represent the same length? That sounds like a good one...

A trick to make things match is to use a cube that contains all - as reference. If you use that in your scene and with all imported meshes it should be easy to position things and the scale should be ok already when you bring things in. The terrain size to me sounds like huge. But a case for a procedural terrain that Vue 5 offers. That you can go as close as you want and the resolution will be ok always. In Vue 5 we only still struggle with a memory issue that hopefully will be fixed soon but could make it difficult to deal with big scenes. Oh, not to forget that you maybe can switch off the automatic resize and reposition option in the preferences.

Hi Wabe - Could you elaborate a little on that "cube that contains all" concept? Do you mean that you put everything - meaning any model you export or import - inside a cube (of known/controlled dimension) then export from other software and finally import into vue? If I got you right, what controlls the scale/position into Vue? Just use "do not center or rescale? Maybe. Thanks a lot. wb

Yes wb (my initials btw), that is the idea. To let Vue rescale to always the same object - the container cube. For rescaling always the maximum values are taken and put them to whatever. You have that container cube in your modelling software, create/put all objects you need in there position them relative to each other even and export that to Vue. Piece by piece, but always with the container cube that you delete then in Vue. BTW, this was discussed long long ago in much more detail. Maybe these threads are still in the archive here. AND, when i remember it right, someone did such a cube (with additional measures) as freestuff at that time too. But this might be gone a long time ago.

Thanks very much, I think I got it and will try this way. Seems just right. I first used Vue several years ago and have finally had a little time lately to rediscover with V5. Very much appreciate your input here. wb

your always welcome! wb

You can use a cube but I use a stick as it's less intrusive. In Poser I have a stick prop scaled to be about 3m tall. When creating a Vue scene I first import one stick from Poser and scale the scene around this. Then every time I create a Poser figure I add one stick to the pz3 scene from the props library. Then when I import it into Vue, it matches the scale of the scene exactly.

This really is going to help. Thanks guys...