Hi,  I am new to this forum, and totally new to Vue!  I am very impressed with a few artists in particular who seem to have a real mastery with CLOUDS and LIGHTING in their few scenes.  In particular, these people seem to have a knack for making their renders look photographic.  My question is this, will my system perform well with Vue 6 if I would like to incorporate a moderate to large amount of grasses or greenery, high quality renders, clouds, awesome lighting, etc??  I have a P4 3.2 GHz, 2GB Ram, a 7600 series GeForce card, tons of hard drive space, etc.  I note in some of the forums that some people (with more memory than me) having problems with MEMORY and other related errors when trying to render very detailed scenes.  Any thoughts are appreciated!!

Thanks! Marc

It depends on what yu are expecting. The graphic card will only accelerate your preview, and not really affect your rendering at all.

Your processor is ok, and should handle renders fine, but if you do larger format renders with more bells n whistles on, that will increase render time dramatically.

Some people expect high quality complex render intwo minutes, and that's just not realistic.

On my athlon 3400+ system here, without all the bells n whistles on, and a full screen 1600x1200 render, I can easily wait 15 minutes for just that. Course, you might also upgrade your system in the coming year, and that would decrease your renders times.

Gareee, thanks for the info - so what about the memory related errors and such that people are having?  I understand that renders can be slow... and that's fine... but my biggest disappointment will be if I set up a scene and Vue decides that there is too much there to render, or I have "run out of memory" or something like that...  Any thoughts in that regard?

Marc

Xp only really addresses 2 gig of ram anyway, so you're already topped out in that respect.

Vue6I is also supposed to have better memory mangement then V5I, but keep in mind that we're all playing with th ebeta release of it now, so it's hard to say what the final "gold" version will be.

I CAN say on my system V6I seems a LOT happier then V5I ever was, and with the ecosystem painting, I'm a VERY happy camper.

There are others here that really push the program MUCH harder then I ever have, and they would be the ones to best answer that question.... of course, they're all probably waiting on a render right now as I type this.. LOL!

Thanks Gareee -

Any thoughts from "heavy" Vue 6 users... as to why some people get MEMORY related errors and such?  Please see above and comment, thanks!

Marc

I'm not sure I qualify as a "heavy user" but I can say that with Vue 5 infinite I had to divide my current scene (part of a big project) into 3 parts to avoid "issues". With Vue 6 infinite I have not ran into this kind of problem and am assembling the whole thing in one scene.
Over all the Vue6 seem more stable, more alert and renders faster. But considering the improvements in Vue6 the "wants and musts" have become greater which at the end gives longer render times.
I liked Vue 5 a lot but I really love Vue 6i! 

OK, last question.  What do you mean by "dividing your scene into parts"... does doing this alleviate memory problems?  Would this involve, for example, rendering different sections of an image at a time and then, perhaps, assembling them in Photoshop?

Thanks again for all the help!

Marc

In my case I have a big stable with several rooms, stalls, imported horses from Poser, many objects and many lights. It is a game project so I do not need to have everything present in every rendered image.
With Vue 5 I had to assemble for example the rooms by them selfs with objects, lights and cameras if I wanted to minimize the risk of crashes. The memory issue only happened a few times for me, my biggest problem was crashes when the scene got too big. And then I had not even added the landscape around the houses.
I think it handles the huge landscapes better than cluttered indoors. And it is a landscape application. IMHO
I am actually redoing the whole thing now in vue 6 because of the better options. .... sigh.... the never ending project...

The memory problems are related to objects relying on huge texture maps for their shading (e.g.  Poser figures), and that's about it. Texture maps are memory hungry, a 4096x4096 image will use 64 megs of your ram, this is not only a Vue thing. Vue 6 has new options for Poser import that can further consume memory, and these options can be used or not. 
I have a 2.6 ghz P4, 1 gig of ram and a GeForce 6800GT. Never get the out of memory message ( honestly) with one Poser figure in the scene. Bringing more figures of course is another story. Your system specs are alright for Vue usage.