I'm still evaluating Vue 8 Complete, but a sure fire way of crashing it seems to be applying an ecosystem of plants to an infinite terrain. 

I'm loving the prospect of infinite terrains, but they will prove limited if you can't put plants on them.

The problem seems to be escaping from a long render. Is this just a 32bit resource problem which I can solve when my new machine arrives, or do they just not work very well in Vue 8?

On infinte terrains you need to use the "dynamic population". I use this combination all the time in 8 and 8.5 Infinite and have no problems with it (64bit Win 7). In 8.5 you can now easily preview the dynamic ecosystem without rendering. That is a big plus.

However, even with dynamic population you can still run into memory issues if you have very flat terrain (far viewing distance) and a  very dense ecosystem.

AsileFX has several excellent tutorials on dynamic population that helped me a lot to figure out how to set this up.

Ciao
TD

Thanks for the reply. It uses Dynamic Population by default.

Resources seem to plummet very quickly when using the infinite terrain even without ecosystems, and even from test render to test render, resources keep falling.

It's difficult to tell if this is a resource leak or just a 2GB address space problem.

I am having no problems with dynamic population on my two 64bit Win 7 systems. Sounds very much like a 32bit problem unless it is has something to do with Vue complete vs. Infinite.

TD

I should be getting my new 64bit system tomorrow with a lot more RAM.

I'll try out the trial version again on that, and see if the overall stability improves too.

That's a good plan. When I switched from 32 to 64 bit a couple of years ago it made a huge difference with respect to system stability and the kind of scene I could do with VUE.

Ciao
TD

I had a scene recently that used an infinite plane and dynamic population, the polygons went through the roof and Vue was using 20GB's of the swap file. My system is 64 bit quad core with 8GB ram.

I send the scene off to E-on as I thought it was an error, ie being that dynamic population is supposed to allow you to create very large scenes etc, they had the same problem, couldn't get it to finish its render.

Jon

Well, dynamic population cannot perform wonders (we probably have to wait for VUE 9 or 10 for those...). All dynamic population does, is restricting the ecosystem population to what the camera can see. An infinite plane is pretty much the worst case scenario. Vue has to populate very far out and with a dense ecosystem this results in an enormous memory requirement.

I find that two approaches help in this situation:

• you can insert a low hilly terrain at the horizon (can be hidden by haze/fog) to cut off population at a reasonable distance

• you can switch to a spherical scene. If you use an earth scale radius (6400km), you wont notice the curvature, but it will help to reduce the scene population because the horizon will "curve down".

I have have used both of those tricks with good results.

Ciao
TD