Very good idea about the cubes...I guess you can do a boolean delete (which is what your talking about)...

Actually, what he's talking about is putting a stretched cube in the scene BEFORE you hit Populate (and have Decay checked) and what will happen is that Vue will not put trees where the cube is. If you basically cover the entire back half of your mountain with a cube, and hit Populate, you will likely have just over half the instances - probably cutting your 800,000 down to maybe 500,000.

Then you just delete the cube - leaving a treeless back half of the mountain, which you won't see anyway, so why bother taking up the resources?

Great idea - hadn't thought of that one!

Just checking - about to get a new computer - how's Vista handling Vue?

-Lew ;-)