Ben, just gorgeous work! And regretabley a modellers nightmare.Look forward to final result ,I have only a laptop at present.A good one but I know of limitations.The only thing I can offer is unless you plan on moving animations that involve camera moves.Clip back trees where they pass behind the watermill.Any reverse polygons on the wheel that won't influence shadows or reflections you could remove.Still.... retain everything for the day your computer or next one can handle it though. :B eaver !

well, off the top of my head, get a faster computer...LOL...have a bit of that my self...great start, very authentic...peace...bobby

I can feel your pain. there were 3 pcs of mine broke down in 3 years. and this is the price for modeling and rendering. nice work, man!

i like the scene! it has got something poetic -

This is a super cool wip Ben! Love your modeling, and also the way you present your work (cool smooth look) and ability to see the wirefame also. When you say your comp is on the verge of crashing .. is that then due to the num of polygons in the scene when you work with it .. or during rendering? If the first, then maybe you could consider using xrefs (with low poly for the differnt elements in the scene), and also you could maybe use layers to separate different elements in the scene and then only have layers you are working on visible. In Max 7 you can also use (I think it is called) adaptive degradation, that is objects turn to bounding boxes when a certain distance from your camera when you work with your scene. Also maybe you could turn down details on the trees, and reduce your scatter until you do a final render? .. This is a beautiful scene, and yes poetic feeling. I cant wait to see it with texture and lighting. Will be very cool :-) Excellent work

Thanks everyone for your comments and helpful suggestions.I'll try them all."Tony" as to your question,I run into problems when modeling,once I get to around 150-200,000 polys I notice a delay due to low RAM.Once I'm done modeling an object I usually hide it,then just render all hidden objects.This helps abit.As for the scatter I only have 1% displayed in the viewports at a time."Abreu" my computer specs are extremely low.A five year old P3,566 MHZ,20G drive,windows 98 and only 64MB of RAM with 32MB on my board.Which is a total joke and an embarrassment.I think that is about the lowest possible to even run 3ds Max.I'm hoping to get a new comp.ASAP.This scene has 635,551 polys,127 objects and 92 lights [91 shadow mapped]for fake GI.Thanks again guys for your help.Ben

Well...In that case I say you did wonders....64mb of ram is an extremely low memory, even for an outdated version of 3ds max. You will do much, much better with an up to date system. Im sure!!

Holy shit,this is really amazing work!You did one hell of a job on the modeling, adding all the details like the buckets,rope,boards,fences and pick axe really make this seem like a real place.The POV is perfect,it really makes you want to walk around and see what's on the other side of the building.The water is awesome and the grass just adds to the realism of the enviroment.When it's all textured and finished it's gonna blow people away.Excellent Work!