I just recently got XFrog 3.5 and I am curious what is the best method of improving the render speed at Final detail - especially with Ecosystem full of them.

The speed in rendering of all 3d models (not only Xfrog's) is not related to ecosystem and neither it is to polygons amount in ecosystem, but it is to bitmap textures. The more transmapped textures you have, the slower. This is why transmapped hair and transmapped vegetation are the slowest things to render. Also, the larger the bitmap textures, the slower. You have many options to reduce render time, I only mention some: 1) for background areas, don't populate with 3D models (which have hundreds if not thousands of alpha mapped leaves), populate with billboards instead (BTW, XfrogPlants libraries come with pre-rendered billboards images for all models) 2) rescale down texture sizes in Photoshop (beware of blurry textures in closeup - make tests) 3) consider replacing some transmapped leaves with polygon leaves (yes, as absurd as it may have sounded in the near past, with instanced distribution, a moderately sized polygon leaved model may render faster than a transmap leaved model when you reach or go beyond the 300-500 instances) 4) disable radiosity for the instanced objects (if you are rendering with radiosity of course) 5) disable texture antialiasing if you are using it (beware: the result may look worse than acceptable in some cases) 6) disable soft shadows if you are using them: the combination of soft shadows through transmapped leaves can be a real speed killer if you have hundreds of plants in a scene.

Very interesting, Orio. About soft shadows: does your advice stand also if you're using soft shadow maps?

I am no technician, so I can't answer on this, because I don't know if it's possible to make soft shadow with maps. I thought that only regular shadows were possible with maps, but I may well be wrong/unaware.

Yes, it's possible to use soft shadow maps in Vue5 Pro Studio & Infinite. I guess some practice will be needed to know about this.

Thanks for info and with Vue Infinite, I am curious if the shadows could of trees could bake into scene in Preview mode and then used the bake images in Final mode.