One tip. The number of cows available when you start rendering defines the number of tiles. IIRC 2 cows = 9 tiles, 3 cows = 16 tiles. If you add cows after the rendering starts, the number of tiles will not increase. Why do I say this? Well it can sometimes be quicker on a relatively quick render to stick to 9 tiles, and add extra cows to work on that, sometimes the data transfer between the Vue host and the cows can be very slow, especially if it's a large ecosystem type scene. So more time spent rendering less transferring data across your network. It's a balancing act :)

If you want a DEM converter try these:

http://www.visualizationsoftware.com/3dem.html
http://www.usna.edu/Users/oceano/pguth/website/microdem.htm

They will allow you to convert DEMs into a format Vue can accept.

As Nano says, 90m is quite course, it might be suitable for distant mountains, but don't expect to pick out many details. You really need 10m or lower, but other than the US, it's not usually freely available.

Message edited on: 07/15/2005 16:01

Yep, I'd seen that LordWexford. I've also run out of memory with massive ecosystems too, though this has improved with the subsequent updates from eon. But that's not a memory leak, just insufficient RAM or Vue not grabbing sufficient memory where it exists. I always understood a memory leak to be where the application keeps grabbing memory, never releasing it back to the system when it had done (e.g. when an object was no longer needed in Vue). I've not seen this type of behaviour from Vue.

"There are known memory leaks on the PC version causing crashing" I read the eon forums quite regularly, not sure what these are. I'm having the same issue that Vue is only taking about half the RAM available, I'd like to see this one looked at. But I'm not having memory leak issues that you mention.Perhaps you could explain more, and whether there are tech threads open so eon definitely know about these issues? "Some people are reporting crashing in the Plant Editor as well" I think some of these problems were down to faulty installs of V5i for some people. Missing files caused some of the crashes as the V5i disks don't like all CD/DVD drives for installing. The workaround is to copy all the CD files to a folder on your HD and install from there. Cheers

Just to add to what wabe is saying, I think Vue does a lot of calculation during the save scene process. For example, populate a large (6000x6000) procedural terrain with an ecosystem. The file size might be around a few hundred mb. But you'll notice that even if saved locally it takes quite a long time to save a file of that size, far longer than you would expect if it was just writing to the disk. This is because I believe Vue is also calculating/saving out the location/coordinates for each ecosystem object. From what I've observed this is done as it is saved, and I'm assuming the data is appended to the vue scene during the process. Now, do this over a network and you've probably got relatively small packets being sent. As such each one is not taking advantage of the full bandwidth of your network, but it is being slowed down as opposed to writing to a local disk. I also believe it's probably done this way to save memory. As if you had to pre-calculate all this stuff before the save you could quite possibly run out of memory then. Please note this is just my assumptions on the matter, but I do know for a fact that Vue reads in each ecosystem coordinate when you load a scene, which can be far longer than the corresponding scene save, so it's safe to say that it is also saving each coordinate. Hope that helps.

Thanks Monsoon, a good tutorial :)

Hehe take one guess how I figured out what you were doing ;) LOL

If it works use it, the display will be much faster and responsive if it's being hardware accelerated via your Radeon card, instead of being emulated via software. OpenGL will be loaded in your system regardless, so don't worry about the memory resources. In fact if anything, I think using hardware OpenGL will make more use of your graphics card RAM instead of system RAM.

Exactly the same... 1. Create your terrain 2. Apply an eco material to it (or make your own) 3. Click "populate"

Have you set it to render to screen or disk? If it's still set to main view you can't change the render size.

Hi Jim, does that work? Cool!! I was thinking that it wouldn't based on the discussions using an eco system to populate a sphere all the way round.

Great :D Now if there was a way to populate downwards you could also add fruit to the trees :)

Very cool. Thanks for sharing :)

Very nice :D but... Where is Eco the Dolphin? :D