Number 8.

Impressive. On a side note, I think it's about time Vue supported true displacement mapping and sub-surface scattering.

Attached Link: Second test

I used 4 default texture types with HDRI. Light/atmosphere was stock settings. It seems transparency and reflections was handled well on the preview render setting. Original image was 3000 X 1688 and downsampled to 800 X 450. Obviously, you'll need to scale up if you need a bigger downsampled image.

For the shadows, you were right. Increasing the light/shadow quality does help alot. You don't need to do it if you're using "busy" textures for the surroundings. Maxing up the settings jacked up the render time abit but it's still significantly faster than a final setting render. So I guess you can go crazy on the quality settings if you're planning on rendering with preview.

Post was done with CS2, resized with bicubic sharper. Converted to Lab mode and unsharp mask on the lightness channel. If you skip the second step, it'll look more anti-aliased but I wanted to test the texture details here.

Attached Link: Render test.

Reflections and fine texture details turned out okay though. Nice way to cut down rendering time dramatically.

Thanks AS.

AgentSmith -- 3 points sambucus -- 2 points buckzero -- 1 point Kinda difficult to choose as some of the entries were kind of "off-topic" (mine included. lol).

TIFF or "Tagged Image File Format" is great for archival purposes as it's generally lossles and supports cross- platforms. Images saved in TIFF format are generally huge in size. Good for storing purposes or if you want to print out high quality works.

You can choose either one as both will present the final image. If rendering onscreen, choose "save image as". If rendering to disk, the rendering dialog before it will handle the rest. Just choose a destination for the image file. Just choose one. I personally find rendering to disk is a "little" faster.

It affect all rendering outputs both onscreen (main workplace) and disk renders.

Well, like you said, the reason they look far and big is because they are. Try scaling up your mountain and pushing them back from your main scene. Try adjusting the haze value also. But I think chohole would probably give you some better advice seeing that it it his/her image after all.

Thanks for the info. Yeah, my new rig will be the above plus 2 gigs Ram and the Radeon 9800XT.