I posted a pic in the vue gallery with some palm trees, sand, etc last night.  I like it a lot.  However someone suggested that I somehow push sand up around the trees as they all are perfectly placed.... can Vue do that?  I am sure it can as Vue can do everything!!   how would you all do that?  to make it look like some sand has randomly swept up against the base of a tree... short of post work

Here's my quick attempt. I created a very small terrain 16x16, did a bunch of diffusive errosion and scaled it so it would gather around the tree trunk. The 16 x 16 terrain is only 256 polys.

HTH,
Chipp

maybe make a bunch of little terains...  , I can try that :)

anothe thing you could do if you are using an ecosystem would be to create several trees and mounds together, save them as .vob and use them to populate your scene. You wouldn't get the benefit of the solid growth trees but all of them would have the sand mounds.

when yhou do that, will they randomize their look, height, etc?

there is a way to populate the ecosystem with mounds under the trees. i dont know how, but i saw it some where.

Only the size (proportions) and the rotation. One a tree in made into a .vob rather than a .veg it is no longer "solid growth" so those aspects ( branch count, twists, gravity, etc...) aren't available.

You could also use a greyscale map to drive the placement of sand bumps and solid growth trees, but I'm not sure how difficult it would be to get them to align.