OK, so I was digging back into Vue this vacation.  (for overview, I am running an i7 laptop, 8mb RAM, Vue 10 Frontier)

Been watching a lot of tutorials that I can.

Have some Christmas money, and was contemplating a few modules, but wanted to make sure I can manage some nice renders prior to investing more.

Getting stuck on the scale of the terrains, versus the EcoSystem materials and trees. 

In a lot of the tutorials, they load a terrain, and then a tree, and the size/scale of the terrain to the tree is not that big of a difference.  In mine, the tree is like a speck of dust? 

Sooo...I thought, well I just drag smaller the terrain, which is well and good, but the EcoSystem materials, when I say Populate, say they are going to make over half million instances...and will kill my memory.  If I drag the terrain smaller, everything goes smaller with it, and I still seem to have the same amount of objects on it.

Basically trying to make a terrain, that will populate an ecosystem, but the terrain is such that it may only make say...64 trees or so...?  I tried making a customer terrain of 32 but thats not it.  I am obviosuly missing a point here?

Any hints or tips would be greatly appreciated!  :)

Best to make the objects in your scene actual scale before doing anything else with them.  Set your unit size to 1.0 if it is 0.1.

...but not out of the woods yet. 

So this is a picture of a 64x64yd terrain...and a 15 ft tree.  Also, and ecosystem of fields and trees.

I applied an EcoSystem to the terrain, and it created over half million objects and sized them as if I was far off?  Is there a setting or something that tells it that I want to apply an ecosystem which is proportional to the size of the terrain?

Loading a tree into your scene, and loading a tree into an ecosystem are two different things.  Both have their own resize settings. 

Anyway, delete the big tree.  Then resize the terrain to 5 miles wide.

You can also set the scale of your eco tree before clicking the populate button.

Sorry, the tree was in there just for an example.  To be honest, my computer groans at a 5 mile wide terrain + ecosystem.....so the goal was to create a small terrain, with proportionate ecosystem on it.

I'll see if I can find anything in the Edit material of the ecosystem materials for scale.

I was attempting something like she does in this Vue 7 tutorial:  http://youtu.be/zRr8UgwIr2Q where the ecosystem is more geared to a close (not distant) type of look. (at about 6 minutes into the video)

Of course I don't have EcoSystem, so I am just stuck with the few EcoSystem terrains that came with Vue Frontier, but I figured I sould be able to get one of em to work similar to that?

Ok.  This makes sense to me now.  I thought you had ecosystem.  I'm slow.

I appreciate the help!  Ecosystem was one of the ones I was contemplating getting...along with RenderUp.  Its the same cost as Esprit "upgrade", and I don't really need the posign ability in Vue...I can get them in there with Frontier, already posed. (if I need a character in there)

Any tips on good/preferred modules, let me know.  I got about $150.

To be honest, I have no idea what the price points are for buyng modules compared to buying apps.  Over the years, I just recommended buying Complete.  That way there's no more guessing which modules to get.

OK, thanks anyway...

I would also just buy Complete if you can afford it. Spend the time creating stuff rather than worrying which modules to buy. It will also mean you can follow just about any tutorial, as Infinite and XStream only differ in that they have additional functionality for integrating with other 3D apps.

Before you start a scene try and think what a realistic scale would be and then go from their.

Remember that the number of instances increase with the area dimension, a 10 x 10 km terrain will have one hundred times more instances than a 1 x 1 km terrain.

If you have Complete you can restrict EcoSystems by putting them in Splines which provides a very useful way of controlling the number of instances and hence computer resources required.

The ecosystems and the eco-painter are the very essence of Vue, if you want to make landscapes. Also I strongly recommend Complete, then you don't have to worry about what you can and can't do.
If you get the FREE DAZ Studio, you can import you own rigged meshes etc. like the pre-animated ones at C3D, with much, much more potential. 

I would love to get Vue 11 Complete, but I don't have $600.  I have about $150...