I was working on a smple scene with one large mountain. I scaled it in the Terrain Editor to 4000x4000 for high res, producing a terrain of over 32000000 polygons. I then tried to create an atmosphere....and found that no matter what I did the clouds refused to show. I changed the camera angle, the lighting direction, the cloud illumination, I tried to add more than one cloud layer...but the clouds wouldn't show up. Even preset atmospheres won't load correctly. Yet if I delete the terrain I can load a preset atmosphere or create one as normal, and clouds are visible in all directions.

This is the second time I have found this problem, while using a high number of polygons. I know it may not be alot to some people, but for my 450mhz 256mb ram pc it is lol. I've emailed Steve Bell on this, awaiting reply.

Any ideas?I really hate it when I get an idea and try to make it work, only for something stupid like this to throw a spanner in the works - grrr!

FYI I'm using the 4.06 update...tho frankly I barely notice a difference between the patches. :/ I also closed everything using ctrl+alt+del before working on this scene.

JoeBlack

32M polys? WOW! Given your PC specs I just don't think your system can handle that kind of load (in other words, its not VUE, its the processing power available to VUE). I must say that I'm at a loss as to what could possibly need a 4000x4000 res mountain--can't you cut that in half (or more) and get acceptable results?

I agree with scifiguy completely. Your computer cannot handle it:-). Vue's latest version is 4.1, not 4.06!!! Guitta

lol ok ok i hear you...biting off more than my pc can chew, it seems :( joeblack

As already said,wow! Im working with an Athlon XP 1800+ and 1024 MB ram. Even my computer wouldnt feel convenient. In the handbook I got with Vue 4 600000 polygons are announced the be the limit! My scenes are about 2 million polygons,and even programms as cinema 4DXL (6.3)are getting slow ,I can tell you! So reduce the amount ,use less in the background and more in the foreground when necessary. rollmops :-)

Hi,I read about that mysterios "polygon-limit" in my German manual.Maybe the authors refered to their minimum 300 Mhz Pentium with 64 MB Ram .Anyway JoeBlack you should get the 4.1 update as Guitta said. rollmops :-)

I am running a 850Athlon with 512 RAM (but not for long, I am updating soon) and my comp stoped cooperating at about 11 million "11,000,000" polys on my latest render of a waterfall scene rework I did. So I think the limits are greatly due to the limits of the individuals CPU.

I think another important point is the system youre running!I my case its Windows NT 4 with SP6.The great advantage is the possibilty to control the systems parameters like memory-adressing,etc.If youre running Win 98 Se,Win 95 or Win Me, you might miss some of that features. I didnt clearly found out the limits of my computer yet,but I startet with an 6 year old 166 MHZ Pentium; what forced my to look at resourses of my PC. My scenes are getting bigger and bigger but I still try to reduce (I hate non realtime-previews and render- ing-times over 47 hours !). So reduce polys whereever you can ! rollmops :-)

True enough. I am running winXP pro and I think that is the only reason I got to 11 million in the first place with a 850 proccesor. ;) I just found that I can tweek my system up to 2.5 gig chip and 1024 DDRRAM and thats what I am saving for. It aint cheep. :(

On this program, I would wonder if dual p3-1ghz chip would be better than one 2.5ghz chip. Not sure how the dual function works in vue/xppro but a new MB and two 1ghz chips might be cheaper or the same price as one 2.5 chip. So all it depends on would be which is faster. :)

This is a bit off topic but since you brought up dual processor configs . . . Since Vue does utilize dual processors during rendering, that is the way to go in my opinion. Check out the database in the Yahoo Vue Group. A dual P3 at 1 GHz is roughly equal to a single 1.5 Ghz P4. Dual AMD XP chips at 1.47 Ghz (XP 1700) are about 3 times faster than a single 1.5 GHz P4 . . .

Ah cool. Thanks for the info! :)