Yes, agree with Bruno, the standard and volumetric atmospheres are mostly obsolete and don't work for large "deep" scenes.  But in a few cases they are acutally to be preferred, easier to work with. And good to have in the arsenal as such :)

Depending on the kind of atmosphere you use, there are several options. The ones bruno021 mentions adresses to the Spectral atmosphere, which is good and the mainstream nowadays. If you don't need the spectral effects (clouds, godrays, realistic aerial perspective etc.) then you could play with the standard settings, these allow you to make fog with negative fall-off (getting denser upwards) among other things. You can't do that with the spectral or volumetric ones. For that effect with a spectral atmosphere you'll need a low cloud layer or something, and considerable patience upon rendering.
An example (by me) of a standard atmosphere with negative fall-off fog:
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1983952&user_id=94819&np&np

• Picture of the Day at E-on and displayed in 3DArtist magazine. Just to emphasize that you don't always need the most advanced options to do well :)

Lars "bigbraader"

I usually render at 2000 - 2400 wide and use custom settings, and rarely go over 10 hrs. of render time.
Renders of 20 - 30 hours or more are usually the results of lacking skills/knowledge, unless they are HUGE.
About Drea's render mentioned above, it shouldn't take that long. Sure, there are some low density clouds, which is notorious for producing heavy renders, but still... I've also noted that she often uses the Vue presets, e.g. the "Broadcast" mode, that's not particularly clever. She may be one of the most popular Vue artists, but certainly not among the most skillful. An example of a skillful and great Vue artist: Artur Rosa. That's a whole different league IMHO.

Agree with JCD, try some static plant models (i.e. not veg/SolidGrowth) for close-ups.
A lot of FREE Xfrog models in Vue readable formats are available here:

http://xfrog.com/2011/01/130-free-xfrogplants-now-available/

For the texture/material in the render here, try changing the mapping mode to "Faces" if it is a bitmapped texture. Otherwise play with the functions.

Lars "bigbraader"

*...well if it worked quickly for me and didn't crash and could handle lots of poser textures rendered using poser in vue then I would do that too, but it causes too much pain to make vue my main renderer...

*I use the COLLADA export option in Poser most of the time. Lets you scale down the texturemaps, and no detectable figure changes.

If there is anything that has a learning curve, it would be the "Function Editor", now that can be as simple or as complex as you like and to use it properly does take some time and effort to learn IMO.

I don't know of anyone who loves the Vue function editor, but I know a few who hate it. That includes me :)
But it's a sort love-hate relationship, because it's a very strong tool, if you have the patience and stubbornness to get (some) grip on it.

Quote - Without wanting to start a war about bias, do you Guys not think that Vue has a pretty steep learning curve?

Wrong. IMHO Vue is one of the easiest 3D applications to learn. I started with 3D using  Bryce and Poser, but soon made the shift to Vue 4, and it was so much easier and powerful than Bryce 5.
Now, if you compare Bryce (7 Pro) and Vue (Complete or Infinite) today, there's just no comparison. Well, not in the pricing either true enough. Bryce is cheap, but so are the results possible with it.
Visit the respective galleries, if you doubt me...

Lighting is ten fold easier to set up in Vue, positioning the sun or moving the lights objects is very straight-forward.
Besides that Vue has a preview render, which in one or two passes (usually few seconds) lets you tell if the lighting is wrong or you're on the right track. The render quality as such is low in the preview, but it is just supposed to be, exactly, a preview.
Lower render settings in Poser means throwing away raytracing and other lighting essentials (forgive me if I'm mistaken - I have made some OK renders with the Firefly engine, but I'm certainly no expert...), and that makes it difficult/impossible to estimate the appearance, without having to wait for it.

There are different approaches to handling the import to Vue. I personally prefer NOT to use the Poser shader tree, it's a huge resource hog. Actually I export to Collada mostly, and scale down the texure maps at the same time. If you decide to use the full resolution maps after all, you can import them in Vue.
The non-shader, collada approach means some tweaking of the texures in Vue (specular, bumps etc.) but I like that, gives me a great deal of control over the appearance. That's just my approach, it's neither right nor wrong :)

Sometimes you can make them go away by changing the antialiasing method to "Crisp". I used to get them a lot, but since I've isolated and removed the objects/materials that caused them it doesn't happen anymore.
Also I've only had them when rendering with radiosity.

Have no idea.
But you could try to render to disk with the stand-alone renderer if your Vue version has that. That rules out any graphic card issues (but the render itself doesn't rely on the graphic cards anyway, unless for some Vue 9.5 specific features).

Also check the antialiasing method, use "Crisp".

I've discussed something with Michel Ronberg, he had a strange problem with Vue 9.5 (also render artifacts) and he turned off the GPU AA accelleration, and that solved it.
Maybe check that...

You may also check the "Post render Options", often the atmospheres come with an embedded "Autoexposure", untick that.
All of the above should also be checked of course. Maybe post a render?

Lars "bigbraader"

Yes, I remember you "sking" - Scott King - from my brief, but intensive Bryce period (back in 2002). You'll love Vue.

Go for Complete, like Shawn says. I have it, and I love it. A few limitations compared to Infinite, but since you're new, Complete is more than enough.
Two features that you'll really love (apart from the import feature): The ecosystems and the ecosystem painter. So cool!

Lars "bigbraader"

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 :)

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.

Add the moved content as a new collection (small icon at the bottom of the items browser window). That should do it :)