Does your client require the figure to be in the pic? Or so prominent?
Does the pic need to be realistic?

I was just thinking of many old Sci-Fi covers from 50's-70's.  Many had pictures that were not true to reality.

You could use Ringworld (or Halo) as an example as seen behind a character.  These are completely unreal.  The atmosphere is very thick  and would block out the view of the ring.
But reality  is not important so the ring and it's day night squares can be seen even for several million miles away.
If you spread the Ringworld in the background across the whole pic, it would not be clear that it is inside a hollow planet. 

From the POV you have now I don't think it is possible to get the point across that it is inside a hollow planet.  A view with the figure looking out over a scene that is fisheye distorted might work.  Take a look at the original cover for Rendesvous with Rama for an idea of inside a cylinder.  Also look at Star Trek II in the Genesis cave.    

Sorry for the ramble, late Friday night and tired.

Here's a funky Sci-fi cover site.  http://www.krazydad.com/visco/

I would just guess that a 932 meg scene would crash a 2 gig machine.   If my scenes get near half of my free RAM, I just say 'Bye-bye'.

Splitting the scene up might be the best idea. 

Can anyone load scenes this big with that amount of memory?  Or is it just my PC's problem.

To have realistic volumetric fire is would be so nice.  Silverblade's 2nd pic looks good.  

I can get Volumetrics to work with metablobs only if all the the objects in the group have the same texture.

My issues with metablobs could go on for a number of posts. :(
 

It works.  I forgot to load it as an aminated texture node.  Thanks again!! 

Sorry.   I wasn't clear.   The avi heightmap is animated and 3 seconds long.  It has the water ripples and rebounds from the edges of the frame.  Because of the rebounds it would be difficult to animate this in the material editor.   Would it be possible to load the avi into the function editor as a color map added to the bump channel?

Thanks for your reply.

Look at geekatplay.com tutorials 6,19 and 34 for a great ways on using ecosystems and animating many objects.  I really find their tuts most helpful and give me many new ideas.

I went and made new default scenes for my different Vue versions.  Now the camera is always in the same place when I start.  The default off to the side camera in Vue 6 Esprit and Vue 5 made me crazy!! 

The merge method didn't work?  Let me know what the result was.  I want to know so it doesn't happen to me.

That can really be annoying.  It has happened to me, too.  Now I unplug my cable modem and close, not just disable, my antivirus/security software.  Now I know I am safe from those updates and have more resources available.  Leave a post-it on your keyboard to remind you to turn the security stuff back on!! 
I also like to run long renders after a fresh restart so I know there are no pesky updates for JAVA or Adobe that have been hiding.  They usually run when the computer starts up.

Good luck.  

Save the camera view and atmo in a scene file.  Open it and merge with the scene you want.  Would that work for you?  Saving camera placement would be a nice feature, but I think merge may be the way around it for now.    

Thanks bruno021, I always forget that the MAT editor comes up in Advanced instead of Basic.

Great idea FrankT!  Cheap and easy.  Thanks for the heads up.

Rendering at twice the desired size with no AA and then resizing usually works for me.  It saves untold hours.  I often render at Preview and it works fine.  

All the videos are amazing.

1.  You could do several things.  Make a simple bird with flapping wings in Vue.  Link the wings to the body.  Duplicate it, then use time splines to make the wings flap differently for each one.  You can also make the speed, and direction change the same way.  A complicated flock of birs can be made this way.

2.  If the birds are far in the distance or up high, they don't need to be 3D or color.  Use the animation you made in #1 and render it as a mask.  Use this animation as an animated texture on an alpha plane in the background.  To make them color, render the animation twice once in color and again as a mask.  Combine then in the animated texture on the alpha plane.  

Remember, the animation needs to be rendered as an uncompressed AVI.  It will be a big file, but it will save your CPU from having to animate 3D when it isn't necessary.     

There are many free simple bird models to download.  

I do love animated textures and time splines.  I feel they are some of the most useful things in VUE.