There are some great ideas here. I often use Vue in combination with other tools, which you can see in my "establishing shot" tutorial, and so showing more of this could be a great set of tutorials.

Also, by "In depth gridmodelling (a la Chipwalters)" do you mean using displacements to create models from terrains? I remember a great example from the early days of Vue where someone made a totally realistic computer case using this method. This technique would go great in combination with "making ruins". I love fantasy settings and the best way to build a lot of that stuff is through displacing terrains. You can get detail that would be difficult to model traditionally and it become easy to texture as well.

Keep the ideas coming. This is a great discussion!

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The Real Teruchan