Hi BT!!

I'm around, but only just  - I still check this forum every so often to see who's still here, but.....

I've gone to the dark side (i.e. V**).

In general I don't post much on rosity anymore (mainly cos I haven't done many images of late in any software - real life TM), but am mainly involved with a facebook V** group, where I also don't post much either... hmmm...

Dave L

Scarily enough, recently I've been using it for fMRI data visualization (functional magnetic resonance imaging of the brain) and experimental setup images for scientific journal publications and conference posters.

Very interesting :)

I think I had the same sense of surprise as Bryster lol. Vue's render speed advantage over Bryce was one of the reasons I moved to Vue.

Having said that though, one thing I have noticed in Vue is that sometimes you can have a material that will just blow a render time to huge levels for no real readily apparent reason. Once did a kitchen scene and a single doorknob pretty much stopped the render - changed the material on the doorknob to somehting that looked the same but was simpler and it flew through. Never had that same kind of (to me) unexplainable effect in bryce.

(And in Vue - avoid placing your camera in a cloud - that can really slow stuff down...)

My renders tend to be in the 3000ish pixel (smallest dimension) kind of size, but mainly in case I want to try postwork but also for the "in case" occurrences of wanting them to be printable.

Excellent news (for me, being a poser 6 user) !

12GB of ram should be plenty. If it isn't, because of the way you're getting 3x4GB sticks to make up your 12, you will still have 3 empty memory slots  to add some more memory at a later date if it needs a bit of a boost.

(Might be something to make sure of when you take delivery of your PC - that there are in fact 3x4gb sticks  installed and not 6x2GB sticks)

From my knowledge (so take all this with a grain of salt)...

the i7 860/870... motherboards only have 4 ram slots on them (dual channel). The biggest ram chips about at the moment are 4gb, so thats where the i7 870 only supporting 16GB comes from (4x4).

The i7 920/930... motherboards have 6 ram slots (triple channel) so thats where the 24gb for a i7 950 comes from (6x4).

I have an i7 860 with 8gb ram and it seems fine. The furtherest I've got into that 8GB was about 4GB being used by Vue - that was for a scene with some pretty large ecosystems of imported complex meshes. Only issue I've had is a few warnings abuot running out of video memory (have a 1gb card) and having to enter a reduced display mode for ecosystem instances.

Unfortunately I haven't had access to a triple channel setup to compare my dual channel one too so can't shed any light on that. I would expect that triple channel with larger bandwidth should help a little in rendering... but not sure how much. Something that almost made me get a 920 was that with triple channel (6 slots) you can get to 12GB of ram fairly cheaply using 2gb sticks (last I looked the 4gb sticks were a bit expensive).

I ended up getting (for right reason or wrong) an 860 for its alleged reduced power/heat output over the 920 as I live in a hot house.

edit - oh, and you might want to think about a 3rd party cpu cooler. When Vue renders, it uses all the cpu cores so things might get a bit warm/hot if you leave it rendering for 10 hours.

Drac is back?

If you're reading - how's things been going?

Vue 8.5 Infinite - Vue 7.x Infinite Upgrade + Standard Maintenance

DVD 690
Download 590

Those DVDs are expensive ;)

Sometimes when I'm trying to make rocky structures like cliffs/rocky outcrops I'll use a pile of  rocks rather than a terrain(s). I've always felt that in some circumstamces this gives you much better control over what you get out. Normally I do this for strucrtures that will be closer to the camera, but when I first saw the image you posted, I thought of it as a pile of rocks  - that'd also give you the overhangs that seem to exist at the bottom of some chunks of the mountain.

Sounds a great project you've landed :)

Out of curiosity, whats the size of the final 3 panel image you're after? The aspect ratio of the panels might end up deciding the type of scene/landscape you try, which, as chipp and bruno have suggested,  might  effect camera setups.

Heresy of the highest order !!!

Yeah Vue 7 needs a lot more ram to load things. I have one file, for example, that loads into V6i with about 70% free resources (after purge) and in Vue 7 it loads with 14% free (2GB ram).

I've seen this as well with a 500000+ poly model of mine, but haven't had the BSOD. My openGL options are set pretty low (but then I only have a fx5500 256MB video card in my PC)..