These cost a little bit of money, but check out the "Poseable Moderate Flow Stream" or the "Poseable Swift Flowing Stream" at C3D. These are infinitely malleable and can be used thousands of times, each in a different way. Shape them to fit any terrain, or easier yet, build a terrain or scenes around them. Lay out duplicates end to end to make long streams. Zoom in for close-ups.  Not trying to sell you anything really, but these were built just to make your kind of task much easier.  

If there is enough interest, I'll put them into the market here.

I'm working on a wider poseaable stream now, and another with stepped pools. But they take time and effort to develop. Lots of unsatisfactory results for everyone that turns out well enough to put into the marketplace.

Ah, sorry. I wrote in such a way that I created a misunderstanding. 

I meant that I am taking a tutorial on how to make cloth that tears. For the tutorial, I will make a few projects for my own learning experience. I would be happy to use something you might like for my own learning experience.  

 OK.

The reason that you don't see a lot of damaged furnishings is that it is more difficult to make such. Especially to make them in a realistic manner.

Typically, a model-builder would have to visualize the damage he or she wishes to have before beginning the model, and then lay out the edge loops  and vertices specifically to accomodate the "damage" areas.

For shattered items, a modell-builder often can get away without pre-planning, but a special plugin to create some version of a Varoini fracture shape usually is required. Some of these plugins are quite expensive.

So, ... a lot of work for not much market for these kind of items. Normally, you "may" find some such items if you search for "trash," although most of what you'll find will be urban street trash. But, sometimes a few pieces of furnishings among them.

......

In the next few days, I'll be working through a tutorial on "tearable" cloth. Do you need a torn table cloth or a torn set of curtains? LOL  

Paula, what would be your top priority object? I've got one day free this week. I could make you something.

You're welcome! I sent you a download link for the models. They are put into *.obj file format, and you may duplicate and alter them as you wish to make as many masks as you wish.

Or you might try these, as well.....

http://www.cornucopia3d.com/purchase.php?item_id=11357 http://www.cornucopia3d.com/purchase.php?item_id=1132

http://www.cornucopia3d.com/purchase.php?item_id=112922

 http://www.cornucopia3d.com/purchase.php?item_id=11368

For most of these, I posted close-up views of the leaves, so that you can judge for yourself without first having to purchase the trees.  There are others in this series of poseable trees, but these references should be enough for you to determine if they will suit you.  

The reason that ATI cards are slower in Vue is that they use a software emulator for some functions that nVidia has as hardware. These functions have to do with geometry processing, so nVidia cards are almost always more efficient and often faster than ATI cards for applications involving 3D. Of course, a more powerful ATI card will offer greater performance than a cheaper and older nVidia card, as a general rule.

CUDA processes do not equate with "threads" or anything else, really. CUDA refers to a way in which certain physical phenomena, such as particles or object dynamics (fracturing stones, for example) are processed by the GPU on the video card (that is, off-loaded from the motherboard CPU). It is a proprietary process belonging and exclusive to nVidia cards. There is no equivalent in the ATI chipset or for any other video card maker. (Hope this attempt at "plain language", non-tech talk is understandable.) I do not know if the particle processes or the new ecosystem/particle processes in Vue 11 make use of CUDA processes on nVidia cards or not. Perhaps someone else on this Forum does know.

For this reason, CUDA being a set of GPU processes that Vue may or may not use in any meaninful way, I agree with aeilkema's comments that it might not be good to go from a 256 bit processor to a 128-bit processor.  However, given that the CPU described above is kind of a mid-range i5, any upgrade to an nVidia card with a good GPU will pull some of the load from the cpu and pass it to the cpu, and that is all to the good. Having more video memory, then is a good thing. So, there should be some real measurable and significant increase in processing performance from the proposed upgrade. Not as much as we would expect to see on an Intel i7 cpu, but nevertheless, some serious increase in performance.

Given that what is being basically proposed, in technical terms, ... transferring a significant amout of processing from the cpu to the gpu, kenmo also has to take into account the motherboard. He has not told us what that is, but it very much matters here. A run-of-the-mill motherboard could be the bottleneck that makes this upgrade less significant than it might be. Or, kenmo could have a very good motherboard, which will make the proposed upgrade everything that should happen with the change.

 post query... I did some tech checking. Vue does not make use of CUDA. So the whole thing being accomplished by the proposed upgrade is to offload some processes from the motherboard cpu to the gpu on the nVidia card. Still, this is an upgrade that makes sense to me.

Kenmo, you also need to make sure that you have sufficient power for the new nVidia 650 card. The stated power wattage requirement is 500 watts for the card alone, but one of my computers has a nVidia 650, and I found that I needed to allow the card to have at least 650 watts to itself. In my case, I had to upgrade the power supply on that box to a 1000 watt psu, a first for me!

No, the Plant Factory is NOT SpeedTree!  It is a completely different product.

2.34 minutes for me. But on a machine that is a bit over the top for a hobbyist.

Vue 11 Infinite.  Win 7, 64

Home built - a high-end Asus motherboard with everything set to default settings. Non-overclocked Intel i7 3930 @ 3.2 Ghz with plenty of RAM (32 GB).  Fully hand-matched Patriot quad memory sticks.

I see that it is available in *.max and *.dae file formats. This means that you probably can pose this guy within Vue.

If you use the *.max file format, you would want to use the MAX importer for Vue, in order to bring in the skeleton that makes the character poseable. You should have received this special importer with your copy of Vue.

For the Collada file format, that depends on which Collada format is used. But, it is probable, since this was built using MAX 2011, it seems. That is the last year that the general purpose Collada importer/exporter for MAX was used, and this is the version that Vue successfully uses to import a rigged object.

It is probable that the animations that come with the figure will not work in Vue.

Yes, the rendering engine IS substantially faster.

Am not sure where the 30% figure comes from - may be an average of rendering times across a variety of scene types.  However, in a timed comparison I've made (on an admittedly very fast machine), render times for five scenes of different complexity ranged between 23 and 58 % faster. I am comparing Vue 10.5 Infinite against Vue 11 Infinite. I used a SSD (solid state drive) for the test, which should have eliminated artifacts caused by placement of the application and the scenes on the drive, and irregular spin-up times and so forth. I rendered each scene twice in both versions, with negligable measurable differences in the two trials per scene.

This couldn't be considered a definitive answer because there are an awful lot of variables that affect rendering times in different kinds of Vue scenes. I was just curious for myself and it was easy to make this kind of casual test to get some sense of the difference. But I'm satisfied that the Vue 11 rendering is all they say it is.

Can't speak to the ecopainter issue.

Well, ... lets just say SOME of the objects are useless. Some of the earliest objects are quite good - they were made by professionals on commission to E-On. Higher modelling standards than I was able to reach at the time.

As Bruno says, the plants are easily worth more than is being charged for that pack in its entirely. A pretty wide selection of trees.

Javil, I am living in the United States, and am not sure that I can physically mail this to you. But I would be happy to do so. Yes, the boxed version has the manual and Extras CD. It is version 7.0, but can be upgraded to 7.5 at no charge. I would help with that.  I am more interested in sending this extra version to a good home than to earning much money for it. Please contact me at forester@mountainflight.us and we will work out the details of shipping it to you.