Hello I am putting together a new animation it is looking like it is going to take a long time to render. I have7 procedral terrains all with grass/walls ecosystems. I have painted various trees/bushes on this also. Looks great but I have yet to add poser figures. I am worried that each frame is going to take well over an hour to render.

Is there a way off making the procedral terrains faster to render but still look good?,( they are very large)

Are you sure you need 7 proc terrains? How about one infinite terrain? You can use one of the presets and apply your own function. Then, use dynamic ecosystems instead of populating so many plants. This will be less memory intensive.

Whenever I use an infinate terrain it seems to bring my computer to its knees (if it had them lol). I have only started experimenting with procedral/infinate recently.  I don't think I have tried rendering an infinate terrain yet but when trying to build a scene on an infinate basis I just cannot for the life of me get anything accurate like resting a poser figures feet on a rock . With the procedral terrains I can fly around my scene and know whats going on !

Does an infinate terrain have the same quality as a procedral terrain ?

Even if an infinate terrain is considerably bigger than the 7 procedrals I am using, is it going to use less resources?

Whats a dynamic Ecosystem? I have stopped going for the material sections ecosystems and began the painting method as it appears to take less time to produce the ecosystem.

Inf terrain  can be resourece hungry, but i thouhg tles hungray than having 7 proc terrains in ascene, But if Vue is more responsive with 7 terrains, go for it.
Dynamic ecosystems are ecosystems that are only created within the camera's field of vue. And they are recreated each time the camera moves. So you don't have instances where the camera doesn't see them. Saves resources.

Aha thanks Bruno my understanding is getting better only problem is I have crafted a nice mountainous region with the procedrals... would be a shame to waste. Is there a way of turning a procedral terrain into a normal one ?
I will have to look into this type of ecosystem , how do I set up ?

I thought vue only used resources for what is on screen.... so it would not matter what was offscreen?

 If you are covering your terrain with vegetation you probably don't need to use procedral. If you have a nice mountain top keep that procedral but make all the others standard. You can change from procedral to standard in the terrain editor. At the top right you will see two icons of mountains. Click on the one with the little down arrow and choose Standard. It will not affect your veg.

I would save the scene first to scene_b or something like that just to ensure your main scene is not wrecked. But try this, it might help.

pikachu's advice is very good. A terrain coverd in vegetation doesn't need to be procedural, because the detail will not be visible.
Now you set dynamic ecosystems exaclty the same as regular ecoysystems. You can try populating to see how it looks, and once you're happy with it, simply tick the "dynamic ecosystem" box, right under the sphere preview. this will erarse the ecosystem in the viewports, and it will be rebuilt at render time, but only in relation to the camera's fov.
Vue will keep in memeory placement of all instances that are created after hitting the Populate button, on or off screen, though of course they won't be rendered, they will use a lot of memory space.

excellent cool thanks for the tips I am going to sacrifice some of the terains for standard ones! I have a few questions about procedral terrain.

Is it best for close ups or does it also serve its purpose well  in a long shot?
when setting the resolution is there a way of doing this eg design the terrain then up the resolution. or up the resolution then design the terrain.

would a normal terrain in a 4000 x4000, look like a procedral at 512 x 512 or am I confusing myself in what procedral and standard terrains actually are.

 Procedral terrains are best for close up of rocks and dirt, but if you have veg covering it all up then just use standard there too. Otherwise you are just wasting resources. If you are animating it I would not use 4000 x 4000 yikes! My mac pro would not only be on its knees but gasping halfway to China!

A tip: to get really nice detail for your close up procedural terrain, go into the Terrain Editor, under the Proc. tab right click on the ball and choose Edit Function, then click on the simple fractal box and under the Simple Fractal drop down box on the left, choose Terrain Fractal, then with the slider below play around  with the Metascale, Largest feature and Gain to get some patterns on the ball. You can get some killer details with this. Good luck! 

Procedural terrains are not resolution dependent, so a 4096 proc terrain will be exactly the same as a 128 proc terrain, it will only take ages to show in the terrain editor! The level of detail depends on the distance to the camera, not a fixed resolution like standard terrains were 256 pixels are used to display the detail, up to 4096. Obviously in this case,the more pixels, the more detailed the terrain.
For proc terrain this 256, 512, etc... resolution is only used in the terrain editor to show you the details on the terrain, but will not affect the aspect of the terrain in your render.

Oh thanks great tips. .. my last animation has standard terrains but I bumped the resolution up to 5600 x ???? and even higher about 8000 in one case!!  .... about 12 terrains I think!!. I suppose this made my render times ultra long for no reason ? and they were distance shots not particularily any close ups.

 If you have distance shots you don't need such high resolutions. Do some experiments.
Take 3 terrains, all standard and 3 terrains all procedural (no materials just the default), then put two in the foreground, two in the middle ground and the last two in the distance. (Having standard and procedural side by side). Then render and see how it looks. Then bump up the resolution every one the same amount, render and look, then bump the resolution up on all again and see what you get. 

Remember, when you put an atmosphere with haze and fog, that can also make uselss any high resolution you put on a distant mountain as fog and haze take away details!

Thanks for all your tips ! I am going home to put a spanner in the middle of my scene ... in fact I will prob start again !  looks so good too ;-(   the thing that annoys me more is how much I raised the resolutions in my last animation!  probably would have rendered in half the time at same detail. .....

But thats what its all about trial and error !! 

Went home and did some tests, the infinate terrain is by far the biggest resource hog, I think it may be the graphics card that cannot handle it system just seems to hardly respond... ram usage is still only 3 of 6 gig - 4870 Radeon. Tried procedral vs standard terrain &  even at distance the procedral looks far more detailed, really could not make the standard terrain detail come close.

Broadcast Level - 1200 x 900 = 23 mins

My last animation was all  rendered at 1200 x 900... is this a wise resolution for animation purposes ?

No preset is wise, they tend to have to much of  this and not enough of that.
Broadcast for example doen't have enough AA, and have to much "advanced effects quality " boost.
For animation, I would suggest this:
Advanced effects quality boost: 40%, uncheck the feautures you don't use ( depth of field, motion blur if you don't have any, though it's good to have motion blur on plants for animations)
Objcet AA should be set to min8, max 20, threshold 60%
Texture AA is enough and will reduce the flickering in procedural materials
You should add 33% texture filtering, this will reduce the flickering in bitmaps and plants
In the advanced animation options, use some distance blur too 1%, max radius 0.2

Then there are your atmo settings to optimize, but you didn't say which model you'll be using (AO, GR)

have not decided on atmosphere settings as yet, have not really gone much further than using one of the preset animated ones or just using a pure blue sky. I did try an AI one the other day and was very impressed when i looked at the scene from above and it rendered in the clouds. I thought I had to create clouds to enable it to do this. Defiantly will try your render settings I usually use user settings anyway I just like to get an idea of how long things take on the broadcast setting. Have you any advice on the size of the resolution ? I want it to look bloody good when I first enquired about animating I was told 1200 x 900 was a good resolution. However other people have said  anything above 800 x 600 is a waste - this is to put on you tube .

No need to go higher than youtube format, it will be resized anyway. But there are lots of so called "HD" videos on youtube now.

In sony vegas I rendered it to 720 x ??? (default setting)  is this so called HD ?

surely if I had rendered the below @ 320 x 240 it would have not looked anywhere near this quality?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQ_Oy7N5a40

What do you think?......... I mean in my earlier attempts at animating I rendered some frames at 800 x 600 I look at them on photoshop and they are very lacking in detail. If I had rendered this animation at 320 x 240 it would have probably taken about 10 hours not 3 months!

Wow, I love the soundtrack! I agree the format is good, and lowering it wouldn't do justice to the animation. i think your foramt isn't HD, but DVD quality. HD is 1920x1024 pixels.
Love the animation,  was it intended that the materials on the figures were changing as they moved? It creates a unique feeling of , dunno, its' quite sick, in a good way, lol!

Its looking like it was rendered to DVD quality in Vegas ~WM9... I think.... avi file came to 6.5 gig so would not go on. The figures materials were accidents... I couldn't for the life of me work out why the skin kept changing everytime i did a preview render! - but I like the way they are animated now .The cruiser is also animated ... another mistake!

So maybe I should use the same resolution for the next animation then.
I would rather the quality vs time.

Thanks for the comments its a bit of a mad one ! lol  I am going to get stuck into some more terrain editing when I get in ... I am sure I will have more questions tomorrow. I really appreciate your help

I think I know why materials move on the figures....

I think when I first put the material on them it asked if I wanted it to be animated... origionally I thought this meant shadows etc, Not literally the whole thing moving I increased the bump really quite high in some scenes too

Also there is a checkbox that says animate material .. don't think I clicked on it.  Waht would be cool is to have an animated material that changes into another material that is also animated is this possible do you think?  Say turn from mud to chrome to water ?! 

Very possible and easy too. 

Look in you're examples there is an example of a frog changing color. And more.
Also you have some animated materials wich comes with Vue.

Doing it yourself is easy also:

1. choose a material at time zero
2. Change timeline to the point you want the new material to be seen
3. Choose new material at the new time. (If prompted "animate material" click YES.

Now you get a gradually changing over time frm the old material to the new.
This is the quick and dirty way.  But there is many more possible.

(PS I still think you had youre materials at "world standard" in youre animation, so when you move an object, the material stays at the coördination, so it looks like its animated, but i could be wrong ;-)

Maybe... I do notice on some of the close up shots the head for example moves but the texture stays ! Thanks for the tips cherryman

Cherryman has the answer: your materials are set to "world standard", this means that the origin of the material is computed at the origin of the world, always. So when your figure moves, the material looks animated, because the distance of the figure from the center of the world has changed. If you had used "object standard" instead, the materials would have used the center of the figure to compute the material's origin, and they would've been consistant.
But it suits the mood a lot better in world standard imho.

Very interesting I notice there are some shots where the material does not appear animated at all. The world standard is very noticeable on the cruiser moving across the scene it does appear to stay still but the ship moves - very weird the more I think of it ! lol

Do you think this effect would have increased my render time ?

I need to double check all my settings.

It's possible, since the material has to be computed at each frame, but I'm really not sure.

I think that using the displacement is one of the large bottlenecks.  Where possible, try to avoid it. 

I have created a rocky/grass texture out of two displacement materials it looks pretty good however I know its going to bump up render times.. can you recommend how to make good looking grassy/rock type material from basic materials/not displacement materials? I also want to add trees bushes etc to my whole scene when I add an ecosystem all the trees seem to be roughly the same length and it doesn't look very good and I would like to have more control over where they are placed. I have tried painting them on which is good but still cannot control the scale and if I want to paint a different type of vegetation... I remove some that I don't want to use and it removes them from the whole scene. For instance if I wanted just fir trees and a type of bush in one section. ....and I wanted palm trees in another.

Sorry if I have gone off topic a bit!

I have created a rocky/grass texture out of two displacement materials it looks pretty good however I know its going to bump up render times.. can you recommend how to make good looking grassy/rock type material from basic materials/not displacement materials? I also want to add trees bushes etc to my whole scene when I add an ecosystem all the trees seem to be roughly the same length and it doesn't look very good and I would like to have more control over where they are placed. I have tried painting them on which is good but still cannot control the scale and if I want to paint a different type of vegetation... I remove some that I don't want to use and it removes them from the whole scene. For instance if I wanted just fir trees and a type of bush in one section. ....and I wanted palm trees in another.

Sorry if I have gone off topic a bit!

About materials, have you checkd the ones that come with Vue? There are some ok grass materials that you can tweak (mostly for bump)
Now about your ecosystems, you can decide where to place them according to either a fractal distribution map or a greyscale bitmap. It works like this: Vue reads how many plant species you have in your ecosystem, and checks how many shades of grey there are in the map. If you have 3 species, the grey shades will be divided by 3 , so on the 33% of lighter shades, the first species in the list will be placed, then on the mid greys, the second species, and so on. A fractal function will have more randomness in the placement (because there are tipycally many shades of grey, since they are read as 16bit), so you may find that the second species gets placed with the first sometimes. If you don't want this, use a custom map with only 3 shades, white, mid grey and black.

I will have to experiment with this when I get home... I kind of understand what you are saying.

I have tried out the ones that came with vue but they look a bit like astro turf on my mountains lol (that is a very good description by the way!) Is it a case of mixing a few... and raising the amount of bump? Also when I mix a couple of materials then select the ecosystem option, select a few plants... nothing apears (just looks like it did without ecosystem) unless I start the material from scratch and use a pre set ecosystem... I would like something simular to hot mountain, without all the trees being the same size, crushed together and that awful ground texture.

I suggest you read the manual for ecosystem cration. There are many parameters you can use to create variations.

Along with my vast collection of photoshop, and poser books I lost all these during a house move ;-( ... very unfortunate ... prob why I spend so much time in these forums... Have looked for a PDF version .. I am looking for a good book on Vue if you have any suggestions?

Vue comes with a pdf manual, just click the ? in the advanced material editor, and you'll get to the topic in the manual.

Doh I never saw that !!!

I Also suggest you take a look at

www.geekatplay.com

They have a lot of free VUE tutorials, from easy to advanced.

The ? was very overlooked lol ...... thanks for all your help

Geek at play is cool, and also the below (great place to start for novices like me)

http://www.silverblades-suitcase.com/tutorials/htm/index.htm

I am having trouble applying any lighting that is ai ao gr etc... the render passes through once then vue crashes ... it renders normally on normal sky .

Bruno you mentioned lightsettings the other day ... :-) more than likely this is my problem (I am using your render settings you mentioned before . There is 55,729540 polygons in scene no procedral terrain (about 12 normal ones though) cant post a pic for some reason.

Oh, Vue crashes during the prepass? Weird. What version, build number? Is it up to date? What's in the scene besides terrains and ecosystems? I never had this kind of crash...
To optimize the atmosphere and lighting, there are several things you can tone down:
If usinf AO or GI, you can put shadow smoothness back to zero, it is very rarely needed with these lighting models. If you're using GR best is to keep it as it.
Now the easyGI slider (quality boost slider) in the light tab can be set to -1 for AO and GI, and -0.5 for GR.
This will work just as good for outdoor renders, most of the times. But if you notice grain or noise in the render, then you'l need to up these settings.

Yep it gets to one square left and just hangs ..yep fully up to date. Just taken my objects out and turned off some terrainsI will get to the botto off this. I can't seem to get the accuracy to set at -1 It lets me go to -07 or -15 .  I didn't really bother with an atmosphere in last animation but certainly will in this next one... even on the pre pass looks amazing. I will let you know when i am successfull

Still unsuccesfull, any type of atmosphere that is not standard, animated (lower quality ones). Crashes after 1st frame of animation. I have tried deleting 13 terrains and 3 bjects leaving me with one terrain and it still crashes. Really annoyed because took me hours to build this scene. I have tried saving the terrains as objects and opening them in another session and the same thing happens. I have done an animation before with 6 poser characters 30 terrains and  godrays (was a bit of a mess!, but managed to render 90 frames) . Maybe it is just this scene that has a bug?!  Is there a way to create a standard atmosphere but with the ability to look throught the clouds from above ? Really desperate to get any kind of atmosphere that is not the standard one.    

Another note all the terrains have a mixed rocky/grass texture madeout of two displacement materials the green grass like one and the 3rd rocky one along. These do not seem to bump up the ram usage and the displacement box is not ticked? Are these classed as normal materials and not displacement? I will try swapping these for different materials when I get in. Do you think this may be the reason for my crashes ?

If displacement box isn't ticked, then there will be bump only. How does it crash, do you get a message? An error report?
Did you try hiding everything from render? Could be the atmosphere indeed...Is your Vue version up to date?

Well depending on the atomsphere used it sometimes crashes 1 box from completing the pre pass. Or it will render the whole frame (both passes) and just not move to the next frame, no indication of a crash until i start clicking then it says Vue has stopped working. Didn't hide anything from render just deleted it in case that was the problem.

Its version 7.5 I am using bang up to date

Crashing is nothing new to me at all vue is about as stable as a 3 legged table !....recently however  it has got better since I used silverblades settings. Usually crashes occur more frequently when using poser figures.

Any kind of crashing can usually be sorted out by shutting pc down and restarting... but not in this case.

There are very good 3 legged tables, it's all about the balance, lol!
Try out a few things to narrow down the problem: hide everything in the scene and render, this would show if the atmo is the problem.
Tone down the atmo settings, and indirect lighting quality. Which lighting model, btw? AO, GR?

lol !!
Will do the hide everything teqnique later I am also going to try and turn off all materials..

Tried AO AI GR GA.... all of them I think . Anything that has to do a double pass in the render fails.

Well, never tried AI....

does it exist !? lol .... what I meant is I tried lots of settings and none work!

Lol, even human intelligence sometimes, I have doubts... You should definitely try hiding either the clouds or objects of the scene. I have a feeling this comes from clouds, but I can't be sure.

I have never done any animated renders with clouds but the idea is to get a birds eye view and floating through the clouds at scenery below ...judging by the quality of the still images it will look amazing. I will also try one of the other settings GR.... AB etc ;-)  ... remove the clouds and see if that turns out well. I still have a sneaking suspicion it is my material.