I'm wondering if Vue users typically scale their scenes in real-world units or just accept the defaults?
 
I think some people have recommended scaling everything up and said that they get better lighting and material renders that way. Do you do that?
 
Also, how do you handle imported objects? Do you scale them to match your scene? Or scale the scene to match the imports? Or what?

Looking for the best workflow, so any info appreciated  :o)

Ok, I'll start.
I work in real world units in Vue6Infinite, and scale everything to fit the Vue scene. Vue trees come at the right size, so it's important for me to have everything to match plants when doing landscape work, Shame terrains load so small. I tend to resize terrains in order to keep veggie size correct when using ecosystems.
For indoor radiosity type renders, I learned from Chipp that real world scale is the most important thing in Vue, so I resize everything to fit real world scale, whether Vue elements or imported elements.

For landmass I tend to use real world sizes, but for import of poser content and models I tend to go with whatever i want to do with the lighting.

It depends of what I'm doing, in my case.

If I use global radiosity, I will typically scale down everything (a person to a few centimeters) because it helps with the typical light leaks from GR.

If I'm working in a closed, very tight environment (like a room, a cave, whatever), and I'm not using radiosity, then I scale everything up because working with the camera becomes so much easier this way.

If I'm working with metaclouds and want to have good control over them, I tend to scale everything up because if you reduce a metacloud you get strange results with the material.

If I'm working with translucency, I tend to scale down to see better the effect.

But in all other cases, I tend to use real world units. A person will be 1.8 meters tall, a mountain will be hundreds of meters high.

I agree with Rutra.  The scaling issue for me depends, to a great degree, on how I want the atmosphere to influence my scene and objects.  If I am doing a render of a simple object like in a photostudio, then it can be really small.  If I am doing a render of an object, say of a barn, and I want atmospherics to influence the scene, then I want it to be large and far in the distance.

hope this helps you.

As I now work a lot with GeoControl, I tend to give terrains realistic sizes and then scale everything else.
I find that atmospheres are typically set up for terrains of realistic sizes, especially haze, which is critical in order to give a sense of scale.

Depends on what I'm working on.  Landscapes I like to keep real-world units, but buildings/Poser imports...  More of an eyeball "pick this object as the scale" things are adjusted to.  If I decide a Poser figure is "it", then I make a cube and use that as a yard stick to make sure building doorways look correctly scaled. 

Thanks folks - very interesting!

I probably do it ass backward - I use real world units(but never really pay attention to the numbers) & just eyeball for scaling.

So when you all scale up do you just move the camera back to compensate for the large scale ? I remember R.Davies discussing this sometime back, in regards to ships & how the ropes always render with gaps in them.