Quote - Have you seen the animation example tutorial "Animated Eco-Population"?

Where did you find it? I have looked in the animations tutorials files and it does not seem to be there.

I have tried to animate some of the ecosystem properties (density) but to no avail. If I start with an ecosystem material, it is impossible to create a material animation keyframe.

Sorry, I did not made myself clear in the last sentence of my message.

In fact what I want to animate is the terrain material itself, not the material used in the ecosystem objects.

I want to have a terrain change materials :
Jungle -> cut down trees -> eroded grassland

I made other tries with Infinite 7.4 and 7.5 PLE.
It is possible to have material animation, but not if the first two materials include ecosystems. .

What I could get is a transition of this type:
normal material -> normal material -> ecosystem material

With any other combination, there is no animation and no material keyframe created.
If I start with an ecosystem material, there is no material animation possible at all.

I tried to trick it by first creating an animation with standard materials and then replacing them with ecosystems. This destroys the existing keyframes.

Czarnyrobert has a Renderosity account, with closeups of his scenes and variants. Also, the images are in larger size.

Rutra, your explanations have just made me understand something I have seen a while ago on the graphique 3d website.

Check out the scenes/Silent Spring page.

The author used a bitmap with multiple shades of gray to control a complex ecosystem.

If you have gone up to 5.5 Gig with Vue alone, you would have reached the limit while opening the standalone renderer with your main scene still open.

I once tried to apply displacements to 2048 terrains. To my surprise, Vue ate all my 8 Gigs of RAM before crashing. In this case, having 12 Gig would not have helped.

For the scene in this tutorial, I first wished I had more RAM. I then decimated the Poser characters (which are barely seen) and removed the complex ecosystem on a large background terrain and it was much easier to handle afterwards.

In my experience, only scenes with large ecosystems and numerous imported meshes can make me hit the limits of my 8 Gigs or RAM. Also, launching the external renderer while a large scene is still open in Vue may make me hit the litmits.

Thanks for those hints Silverblade.

I also installed the Nvidia CUDA drivers in order to use them with 3DCoat and it did not suit Vue. I uninstalled all the CUDA stuff and rolled back to 182.50 drivers. It works, but display is unusually slow.

I will try your method to completely wipe out these drivers and try to install 186.18

*Fixed wrong bump mapping onto UV-mapped mesh objects.

Aaargh. This is one of the bugs I submitted recently. *I even sent a scene to show the problem. So now it is corrected in 7.5, but I am still with 7.4, so I will not see it for a while. *

I was not very enthusiastic on the procedural terrain thing. In many examples I saw, the results looked more like whipped cream than eroded terrains. 

This one looks interesting. I like the way Dath Pandi uses Radiosity.

I am also expecting his tutorials on water and materials to be very interesting.

Still waiting for the book "Vue 7.5, beyond the basics" I ordered a month ago.

If you are rendering for very long times and your computer is in a warm environment, check out the motherboard, hard disks and CPU temperatures with a program such as SpeedFan.

I agree with Alexcoppo: if you read all that is written on Mac-fan forums, you get the idea that a PC with Vista will fall to pieces upon first use.
With Vue, this is actually just the contrary. A fellow French Vue user installed Vista 64 on his 8 core, 16 Gig Mac Pro, and discovered that Vue runs far better on it than on Mac OSX. Preview renders are even 4 to 6 times faster than on Mac OS and Vue seems to handle the large amount of RAM far better on Vista 64.

As for your tutorial, Siverblade, I think you will have to update it every 6 months or so :-)
I see that you recommend large drives vs a small fast / storage combo . I have a Velociraptor on my graphics machine and it was an improvement, even though it is still quite expensive (the 150 gig version is probably a more reasonable deal). SSD drives will hopefully get affordable some day and be a good option for a system drive.

Another solution is to disable the UAC if you are running Vista (if not already done).

Nothing to say except that nature is still the greatest renderer existing today. And it does all of this in real time!

I recently purchased a GeForce 260 GTS from Gainward, the series with 1700 Mb of ram.

It is apparently overshoot, but I noticed that it was significantly faster than my previous 8800 GTS on the heaviest scenes (including this one). This is the case for scenes that have imported meshes with heavy textures or large ecosystems.

It still does not help reduce the flickering when I inadvertedly open a scene with a non dynamic ecosystem with 800,000 plants (for one terrain, did not count on others).
 

I saw their free vid, but am waiting for the one they plan about seascapes. Looks promising!