Greeting all, I am new to Vue, using Vue 6 Espirit with Ecosystem and Botanica modules. Most of what I am hoping to do right now is open prairie and savanah sorts of scenes (hence the Ecosystem module). I have a modest selection of grasses now, and have gotten them more or less color tinted the way I want (more the browns than greens), and have populated ecosystems with them quite well. However, these ecosystems are, um, massive. My first convinvingly good looking attempt was over 172,000,000 polygons. I was able to adjust some plant sizes for the primary grass object and got that down to around 70,000,000 polygons, but that still takes forver to render on my system. I am currently doing the following to help economize : I have a small terrain in the foreground with an ecosystem on it, then a larger terrain behind it with a slightly sparser ecosystem on it, and then a very large terrain with a matching color texture and no ecosystem. So, with all that - is there anything else I can do to help reduce the polygon count, or somehow speed up renders? Even in Preview mode in a small window (480x360 or so) it takes 25 minutes or more to render, and a final render, even with custom settings to turn off most of the fancy stuff, takes around an hour and 15 mins or more (without the fine tuning it was going to be something like 4 hours). My system is poky, I know, for Vue, at a 1.33Ghz G4 and 1Gb of RAM, but is there anything else I can do to help me along here, older and wiser heads of the Vue world?

Well it depends on what you want to archieve or show to the viewer. For a still its easy to trick around with alpha planes, you can have a full forest as an alpha plane for background. For the ecosystem there is generally not much you can do, the more different species you have, the higher the computing power needed to handle these. I made an ecosystem that consisted of over 250 million polygons, but it was just one terrain (with the ecosystem) and the ecosystem consisted of just one plant. Having it this way vue handles and renders the scene very fast, also lighting/shadow options can influence the rendering time a lot. In your case as the preview render is ultra slow, the problem is definitely not the render options or resolution, its lighting or ecosystem complexity. It also helps a lot to make plants or objects in the ecosystem less complex, you can reduce polygon size and save the plant as a special species for this scene. This is especially usefull if you have many plants in a far background and you use the high polygon versions for very far plants or ecosystems. You can also reduce texture resolution for your "far away" plant versions. Other tricks are scaling up a bit - bigger plants means less needed to cover the ecosystem. Also give a try rendering with cheap athmosphere, standard lighting model without radiosity/volumetric/spectral effects, so you know how much rendering time your lighting costs.

For a still just cut anything out that cant be seen, try covering computing and polygon expensive party with plants/objects and delete them. render with less anti-aliasing and do that in postwork.

Here's what I do, I add cubes to a new layer, and i shape the cubes so the cover all that is not into the camera's view, that is the sides and the front of the camera view, ( the front but far from the camera) And use some decay near foreign objects to a value of 2, so the ecos won't populate where the camera can't see. If some other objects are in your scene, they will prevent ecos to populate too, if you don't want this, in the object manager, click the 2nd little icon from the right under the material preview, so these objects will be ignored when populating.
The alpha plane option is a very good trick for distant ecosystems.

More ram would also help, if you want to continue using your current system.

1.33 Ghz is really old, I'd rather save the money for a completely new system. I have gotten my new system (3.2 Ghz celeron, 2 Gig ram, Vista) for just 530 Euro, if you can spend a bit more you can also get a better processor and more Ram. I'd suggest 4 Gig if you can afford it, then you can even handle large scenes. IMO its not good to still invest money in such an old system, even if it can hold enough ram, the ram will be slower and 1.33 Ghz will be too slow for the next version softwares i guess. I used my old system untill it "died", good i didnt invest anything more into it, so i could afford the 2 Gig Ram version. ^^

Yeah, that is kind of the problem, I guess, with adding anything A G4 is just old (alas) but fundage is not readily available for a new system, and I am as a matter of necessity needing a laptop. I would love to get a new MacBook with the Core 2 Duo processor, but having just plopped the money down for Vue, fundage for that is quite some time away.

One important item you should remember if you buy a laptop; most have onboard Video chipsets that share the system ram.  

Shared ram does not support OpenGL Hardware Acceleration, so you would have to use the slower Software Acceleration.  Which would defeat the purpose of a new system since the Software Acceleration only supports OpenGL 1.1, and 2.1 is current, much faster.  Maybe a small desktop with a big video card would be better in the short-term?.

A trick i came up with is to decrease the distance to the horizon (so you can use a smaller EcoSystem terrain, plane or set of planes) by tilting the far edge of your terrain or plane upwards. You can tilt quite a bit before it becomes noticeable.

You can also use a line of hills or mountains (small scale and fairly close to the camera) to cover up the horizon. Spectral lighting or other haze and fog can make the small scale terrain look far away.

I usually use a set of planes that barely cover the camera view, with the level of detail of the objects in the farthest planes set the lowest.

When you need terrain, procedural terrains have an automatic LOD (Level of Detail with distance) feature, so use those instead of true meshes.

Sometimes 2 simpler terrains poking through each other can appear more complex than a single complex terrain, even though each is much less than 1/2 as complex - a synergistic effect.

Decimating objects before adding them to an EcoSystem might help.

The above is written from Vue Infinite experience and might not all apply to other versions.