modelhead, could you explain the techniques that you mentioned here? Besides turning on hardware acceleration, I wasn't aware that there were techniques that could be applied to speed up a scene. I'm very interested as this could help out with speed issues.

If your feeling adventurous overclocking intel quad cores is pretty easy. Ive heard tales of the cheapest i7s being overclocked to 4 GHz with stock air cooling, so getting them up to 3GHz probably wouldnt be too bad. Would certainly be useful for rendering, as well.

What you are encountering here is more a limitation of SU than your computer. To put it bluntly, SU doesnt like even remotely high polycounts. The best workaround found so far is to put as much of your model as you can on separate layers. In your case this would mean putting all the detailed stuff (houses etc.) on a new layer. You can then turn this layer off until you need to do the final exports/presentation. Oh, and just for the record, file size doesnt really play a huge part in how fast models are in SU.

My £0.02 worth... I believe that this matter is somewhat related to the announcement poll suggestion of arranging certain parts of the forum into separate forums for the varying genre's that SUF users use SU for. I would have expected that for each genre (whether it be Architectural Visualisation, Automobiles, Woodworking, Art etc...) that it would contain the same galleries arrangement that we currently have on our main page as a sub forum within the new genre's forum. I think keeping the galleries within the each genre's forum as sub-forums collates all topics and images in a concise method than perhaps having a forum for each genre which would be used for discussion only and all gallery work for that genre would be found in gallery category with genre sub-forums inside that. I say keep it simple and all anything to do with the genre in the 1 location I agree that the SU gallery should only contain images exported directly from SU with no image editing. Post processed images in my opinion should have its place within the renders gallery as pushing the render button is only the first step in create a PR/NPR render; so long as any images posted are clear as to how the image was produced ( but the artist posting the image usually gets asked this anyway!)

Thank you guys. I need some help deciding between these two: Space Nav vs Space Explorer. The first one is $60 dollar and the second one is $300. It looks like both work the same way, but the second one has some extra features and I am not sure how useful they are and if it is worth paying $240 more for those features. Link for $60: http://www.3dconnexion.com/3dmouse/spacenavigator.php Link for $300: http://www.3dconnexion.com/3dmouse/spaceexplorer.php

Thank you, everybody, for taking the time to answer my questions. For the first question, Todd's trick did what I needed. Now I am able to make seperate image files and put them together and make one big image. Thanks Todd. I apreciate the answers to my second question too, but I am kind of lost. May be I am not good with layers and scenes yet, so I feel like I am not understanding something. So, the first trick would be using 2D trees and 2D people and replacing them with the 3D trees and 3D people, right? What about the size (height) of the trees and people? Do I need to adjust that or replacing object will be the exact size of the orginal object. I could try it out myself and see, but just wanted to ask if somebody has already done it. The other one is to make layers for those heavy components and turn off that layer while working with the image. But the problem is, at some point I have to be able to put them all together and show my boss. That is when I am going to have problem as I can not orbit around to show him. Thanks for your time.

@dave r said: Maybe the writer meant "grove"? Maybe indicating that there would be trees. Thank you for your reply. I think you are right. He was talking about having nice garden in front of each buidling.