Wabe, Ryan and Fuzzy, thanks for the input.

I should have mentioned that 90% of the work I do is residential.

I'm aware of the 3DS vertex limit, having used 3DS up to v4.  My thinking is that Rhino can solve a lot of these kinds of problems because of something I discovered, quite inadvertently.

The biggest problem I've had with making manageable chunks out of 3DS files is that if I mesh objects seperately, getting adjoining edges to meet exactly can be a pain.  Meshing the whole thing and exploding the mesh results in a cloud of triangles that have to be sorted through, reassigned and 3DSOuted again to rejoin and reweld.  (Remember, I'm only using AutoCAD)

Rhino will solve this problem for me.  Take a typical street intersection for example. You have a roadway, curbs, grass median, mulched plantings, a sidewalk and a lawn.  In Rhino, I can model each as a surface, join the whole thing into a huge polysurface and mesh the polysurface as a single object (all the mesh edges meet perfectly).  When the Rhino mesh is exploded, however, instead of ending up with a screen full of triangles, it explodes into separate polygon meshes corresponding to the original surfaces they were created from.  Ie. a road mesh, separate curb meshes, separate grass meshes, separate walk, mulch and lawn meshes.  Each easily digestible on 3DS export and with absolute edge continuity.

The other thing is that Rhino is great for building landscapes from curve networks, lofted surfaces, edge surfaces and point clouds.  So my thinking is to use Rhino for both the building and immediate landscape modeling, import into Vue, assign materials, populate the Rhino landscape with Vue (Trees,vegitation, rocks etc), insert lighting and use Vue terrains for adjoining ambiance. 

So, now that I understand a little about Vue import scale, my next question would be; Is there a way to set the insert scale of Vue vegetation or objects (such as rocks) globally?  If there is, it should only be a mater of import mesh and landscape, assign materials, populate landscape add terrains and lights, render.  Yes?  Seems like it would go fairly quickly.

I think the next step is to mesh out a Rhino file, burn it, take it over to my friend's business and see if this will work.

Thanks,

Frank