Hi lululee! I have Max (V5) too, as you know, but I don't use it for landscapes. Vue is significantly better for this purpose.

Great tangent, tho' "smallspace". We all probably learned a lot just now.

Count me in too! I'll help. Anything we do re lighting will be useful, and will probably help others. Lighting is the most critical element and the first rule is to never take it for granted. Re: Kutter's comments about a common place to work, ... I think I can make part of my web site available to all via Anon FTP. Will take me a day to work out how, but was wanting to figure this out anyhow. I have lots of space and my web site is sitting right on top on the eastern Level 1 Line for the US, so it can handle any bandwidth anyone might have. Will post a URL here tomorrow if I can get this up and running correctly tonite. If anyone needs FTP software let me know.

ebsmooth, I'm about to market some waterfall objects. Would you mind testing one for me to see how easy it is for you to use in your scene. (I'm a modeller - not an artist.)Just send me an e-mail address, and I'll send you a URL to download a test version. Is rather a large file.

All the pictures look great. Really excellent. Good composition, and good concepts. Seems we are fortunate to have a lot of talented artists among us. I'm saving copies of them all for future inspiration.

Nice pic! And thanks for the rendering time data. These posts help all of us.

Good for you! Water is a tricky thing, isn't it.

Nish, why don't you try a tiny little render (320 x?) to see if it is the anti-aliasing that is the source of your problem. To turn off the anti-aliasing, you need to make a Custom Render, and then select everything as if for Ultra, but de-select the anti-aliasing. Clear enough?

If you get one and I get one, and we link up, we can build a spaceship, no?

Not bad at all, Thalaxis! I'm used to coffing up around $500 for motherboards every few years, so $299 is a good deal. Thanks for the link, too. I'm going to check it out right now.

One thing I've found useful is to turn off the anti-aliasing and then render water scenes in Ultra. The anti-aliasing kills all my reflections at the last pass - the darn thing! In Ultra mode, you're usually getting a fine-grained enough render that you can do without the anti-aliasing anyhow. (This is for scenes with volumetric atmoshpheres.) This may not work for your scenes, tho'.

Hey thank you Thalaxis. You are quite knowledgeable. I am a sys builder (among other things) and am planning to build myself a new machine in a month or so. I think I'll take a look at the dual Xeon rig you mentioned. I appreciate your comments - they're useful to more than sacada. Personally, I really do like the nVidia geForece cards for 3D work - much more than the ATI Radeon's. The OpenGL is the nVidia cards always seems more standard/stable and always works well with a wide variety of my software programs(which are MAX and Truespace, Vue, et.al.)

These are really nice. Thanks Andy!

Say, a bunch of us hardware techies checked out the new "hyperthreading" P4's and concluded that this was mostly hype on the part of Intel. We did some controlled tests and found no real gain at all, in almost any kind of processes. There are some long-winded and heavily technical papers on the web that go into all this, but the gist is that the only speed gains are for program processes written specifically for this method of pipelining. Mostly a marketing ploy by IBM. And, as Thalaxis says, you definitely don't get "two processors" so your rendering times won't speed up due to the "hyperthreading" capabilities of this new P4. However, Thalaxis, I've got software that looks at the "threading", and it does appear to be that Vue is executing multi-threads. But, there is no way to tell how well it is "managing" them or optimizing without looking at the program code. Everyone should note that multithreading is not the same is making use of dual processors. Vue definitely does a good job of exercising both processors in a dual system - normally to the max.

Thanks for the note Dale. I'd like to see the animation when you have something you like.