Thank you all for your info and advice.  I will look into just a good single graphics card.  6 or 12gig of RAM is still to be decided on. 

I have some project ideas that involve 1000's of objects and just want this system to work good enough to achieve what I want.  

You may want to look into RPC's if you have many design projects like you are doing now.  (they may not have many children available, but many others)

Check this website

archvision.com  (Home of RPC model and figure collections)

and look at

vismasters.com  (location for architectural renderings and info)

Great ! Thanks Paula.  Now I can see if there is enough money!! :)

Thanks for the tutes.  They were very helpful.  The 'alt' key will be used often from now on.  :)

I tried a short faucet animation once.  I used metablobs.  Hard to do but interesting to try.

If they are acting as the head and tail lights, you could just group them with the motorcycle.
Give each light a suitable name, then in the objects list, click and drag them into the motorcycle group.

You might want to try mixing a black and white picture of a tooth with an iceberg terrain in the terrain editor.  You can make a simple picture using a paint program.  Make the tooth shape white and the background black. 

Create a terrain and double click it to get the terrain editor.  Click 'reset'  then 'iceberg'.
Click 'picture' and load your picture.  Use the little button at the top right of the pic to invert the colors.   Use the mixing slider to try to get something that might work.  

Not sure if this is what will work for you or not, but give it a  try.  :) 

Does it need to be 3d?  If you are not animating maybe the far away parts can be done as a texture with an alpha channel.  Take a pic from above of the road.  Take it into Photoshop or something.  Draw an outline of the road where you want the guardrail to go.  This will be made into a terrain in Vue.   Load the road outline into the terrain editor.  You will probably have to increase the scale.

Make the guardrail piece on a black background and save with an alpha channel.  Use this for the texture on the terrain.  You will have to play with the scale and position settings but I think you can get it to work.

Up close you could use some 3d guardrail.  

I have tried something similar but not exactly.  From watching many geekatplay.com tutorials, it seems like a good way.

Another posibility is to use replicate to place the pieces in their approximate locations and then move them into position.

 Good luck.

Yes, it's true.  Try it out.  Took me 15 seconds to test. 

I don't have a MAC but just did a search and found this. 
The basic screen capture is the same for Panther and Leopard.

http://lifehacker.com/341135/leopards-additional-screen-capture-options

Most V6inf stuff should load fine in Pro Studio.  The nodes that aren't available to edit in V6PS  still work if the file includes them.  Distance to object below will work. 
As far as my exprience, Ecosystems all work fine.  I think Ecosystems 2 is related to what can be done in the program not what is saved in the .eco file.   V6PS can't do ventilators, Breeze or paint, but this info is only saved in the scene file not the .eco.   

If I am wrong, please let me know.

Have fun.

Thanks for your advice.  :):)  I'll wait and see if the price comes down this month.

Using the PLE to export OBJ works fine for me.

I guess to make this work right, you would need to decide how big the hollow space is?  If it is 1000 miles across it will be very difficult to show it.   

Does the character have to take up most of the cover?  It will be difficult to have this big person in front of a space that is supposed to be vast, especially with no sky and horzon to show vastness. 

If it is smaller you can llok at several of the old spherical space habitat ideas for the past. 
There wasa  Star Trek Next Generation epsiode about an undergound city that was in a pretty big space.

I can think of so many ways to show a hollow world both big and small.   

Thanks for all of your input.  Interesting differences.  I have been rendering uncompressed frames as I will be editing them and compressing for final on DVD.  

If I weren't post working the frames I might be tempted to use a lossless codec but as stated in the discussion, stopping a codec render means starting the whole thing over.  Been there, done that.

I always remember the time I recorded an mp3 off my sound card and saved it as an mp3.  By doing this I had taken away so much sound info that it sounded like a speaker in a tin can.   Original mp3 had 90% compression and then copied and lost 90% more.  Multiple compressions kill!! 

Thanks again for your ideas.  I was going to render too large.