It is not much a problem of memory leaks. I have not yet seen Vue 10 eating up all available memory and reducing my PC to a crawl. 
But it takes a long time to load and save scenes. 

iloco, unfortunately, I do not think Vue 10 has improved much on loading times and memory use. It takes a fairly long time to load or save even rather simple scenes with few imported files.

I saw a few months ago that he had died. The links to the galleries have been removed from the homepage, but fortunately the pages are still available.

I must say that the swords this guy designed have a very "fantasy" look, starting with Conan's father sword and the Atlantean sword (my personal favorite).

A while ago I found a website called myarmoury dedicated to sword and other weapons collectors. They have very interesting weapon reviews with detailed pictures (you need to register in order to get the full size views). A very handy reference for modelling.

I modelled this two handed sword from a set of photos found on this website

It is not difficult to see which features would be needed in Bryce 7.
 

A while ago, I wrote a Bryce 6.1 vs Vue 7 Infinite article with a rather complete feature comparison. The features highlighted in red are the most interesting ones. Some of the things I noted as missing for Vue 7 have been addressed in Vue 8 (for instance the view flickering).

Quote - This morning, on my way to work, I saw some enormous cumulus clouds above a beautiful landscape.

My first thought was "nice render".

Shoot me...

God has the most powerful of all renderers. He can do radiosity, volumetric clouds, godrays (hence the name) and infinitely detailed textures.

And he does it all realtime.
 

You switched from Vista 32 to Windows 7 64 right?

How much memory does it use from your 8 Gb at startup, with the default services loaded and no other process selected?
I am considering upgrading too (from Vista 64).

@Agent Smith

Yes, the first incarnation of Virtual Lands dates back from about 10 years. I started brycing in 1996...

Thank you very much for your suggestion. I was able to export the BlackPearl by giving every one of its parts a generic texture. I might give it a try in Bryce 5 as it would be more practical to retain the original textures.

@Bobbystahr
In fact Renderosity seems to remove the products that do not sell well... which was the case for my grass.
As you suggest, I can offer it as a freebie.
Some people have suggested that I offer my Vue plants in .obj format to make imports in Bryce and Terragen possible.

I am working on packages including several of them, but it takes time as I export several variants of every plant.

I wanted to have some feedback from Bryce users on this. Does it sound interesting?
Or do you already have enough ground plants to work with?

Quote - Casual Internet people don't browse past the 7th link on Google.

Recent analysis of the click through rates on the first result page of google show 60 to 80% of the users click on the first three results, leaving very little for others. Of course, this depends on context, but it is quite interesting. The study is available here: http://www.seo-scientist.com/google-ranking-ctr-click-distribution-over-serps.html The situation is probably quite different in images search engines.

Quote - Renderosity is most certainly not the answer, of course. You have to be a member to view.  

Renderosity has managed to get tens of thousands of pages indexed in Google, including some news and image pages, probably by using cloaking based on user agent.

But the question is: do they get ranked?

I post my images on several different websites: my own one (www.virtual-lands-3d.com), Elfwood, Renderosity, DeviantArt and Epilogue. I made a series of tests in Google Images for some keywords contained in my image titles. : only my website and elfwood rank on keywords in image names such as Gauntlgrym, Tantrevalles, Ledo road and elven fortress.

So what does this mean?

If you cannot post on Elfwood, the surest solution is to make your own website, focused on Tenochtitlan or Aztec imagery.
You will be able to optimize it the way you want. The main problem will be getting quality  inbound links and gain enough popularity to rank. It took 6+months for my website to rank on interesting queries for instance.
I think you should also make sure the website is designed to achieve well defined goals. Getting trafic is one thing, transforming it is another. Maybe you could come up with more specific queries containing the Tenochtitlan keyword.

Sorry for the lenghty and OT answer but I could not resist (I am a SEO Consultant in "real" life).

Also, there is a nasty option in the general preferences (preview options: top, right) :
disable automatic material preview rendering

This means that you will always have to click this triangle to get the materials updated. I recommend to uncheck both options in this area.

For some reason, the above option gets activated sometimes, maybe through a keyboard shortcut.

It depends on what you plan to do with Vue.

If you want to use several recent Poser characters with clothing and props in your Vue scenes, you will probably have to upgrade as with your current system it will be difficult.

Another intermediate option would be to switch to a 64 bit OS on this system and get 8 Gb of RAM.

I use Vue on two computers:

• Quad core Q9450 with 8 Gb of RAM and a GeForce 260 under Vista 64
• Dual Core HP laptop with 4 Gb of RAM and a GeForce 9300 under Vista 32

I have far more crashes with the laptop. Crashes with the desktop are really occasional.

Many of my crashes on the laptop are due to the lack of resources. I can barely get 1.5 Gb of Ram for Vue with this 32 bits system, even though I got rid of most of the HP crap that started at every session.

Crashes seem to occur more when: - I use standard ecosystems on very large terrains

• I have scenes with both large ecosystems AND a significant number of imported meshes
• I stop some sensitive actions abruptly (render, ecosystem population)
• I do some silly things such as using a bitmap driven displacement map on a 2048 pixels terrain.

I have had hardware related trouble with previous builds of Infinite, OpenGL drivers and my 8800 GTS board, that very few people seemed to have.

Also, objects with a large number of individual parts, such as some XFrog cacti (every spine is a separate object) or this model of the back to the Future DeLorean, slow down display a lot and may lead to crashes (even with my 1700 Mb of video memory).

There are extensive tutorials on how to make custom plants at www.asilefx.com (alas, not for free). You may also try geekatplay.

I have made one on my website called custom leaves for Vue trees.

I have made various experiments with ecosystem layers while writing this tutorial about using the layer affinity feature.

I have never come across your problem while preparing the tutorial. There was a bug in the previous build of Vue 7.4, but it is solved in the latest one (43993)

I made a few other tests and I had trouble in one very specific case.
If I load a new ecosystem bitmap material while the ecosystems layers are populated, one or more layers will no longer be rendered. They populate normally, items appear in the viewports, but they do not appear in renders.

I am not sure that the issue is exactly this one (changing materials while the ecosystem is populated) as it only seems to occur with one of my bitmap materials.

Changing the eco material to another one after clearing the ecosystem solves the problem.

For your problem, one thing you may want to check is the environment tab for your ecosystem. When you create a new ecosystem layer, the altitude is set to 0 ; 1. If so, change it to -1 ; 1 to cover your entire terrain.

I have uploaded a demo file for you with an unpopulated ecosystem here.

Can you populate the ecosystem on this one?

Hi, Mazak. No need to send me the file. 

I have understood why it did not work for me. It is a 7.5 functionality as indicated on the product page, and it was not included in the 7.4 update (which is the one I use).

I will upgrade to 7.5 if need arises.

Thanks for your help.