Hi. Is there a way to simplify a very detailed model for using it many times in a scene? For example; a naval battle with lots of galleons in the distance. Two or three in the foreground and the rest in the background. I know that I can clean the model taking out lot of things but is there an automatic way? Thanks in advance.

you can decimate the model, right click, edit object -> decimate then lower the number of polys, but this is a fairly good way to make the model look ugly...

You could also make an ecosystem using the boats instead of plants.

Ok... thanks a lot!

I'd suggest the ecosystem approach. You'll only need one instance of each. And it seems that Vue handles heavy objects better as instances, uses less resources, at least that's my experience. If you need to handle them as "objects" you could try and populate them on an invisible flat plane object, and lower it under the watersurface. Also kill all randomization.

Vue also tries to help you - copies are actually instanced for you (but that only ever comes up as something you need to know about if you're working with Vue's Python).

Many thanks bigbraader and Impish, very kind of you. I'll try out all.

It's true about the copy/paste approach as well.
But I just made a test with a fairly complex V4 character in detailed outfit. Standard import made the resources drop significantly, duplicating the object 10 times resulted in slight resource drop for each instance. The same for copy/paste.
I then imported the same figure into an ecosystem (new scene). Resource drop was less than half of that of the standard import. I populated the ecosystem plane with about 4.000 instances, no reportable resource drop.
Interesting, I think :)

Yes.  A copy of an object uses less resources as the original object does.  And an instance of an object (eco generated) uses almost no resources.

Another way to do it would be to render your ship in the same atmosphere as your final pic, save out the alpha and make alpha plane objects. You can have a whole fleet with almost no overhead at all.....for anything in the distance.

Many thanks to you all! The different approachs are very interesting. I'll try out all of them.