Hello everyone,

Trying to determine the opinion and activism of the public and architectural professionals in regards to sustainable timber.
I've put together a quick survey, participating takes no time at all, and you'll only answer up to 14 questions.

I would be grateful if all of you participated.
The survey can be found here:
http://sustainabletimbersurvey.blogspot.com

I am an architecture student at Oxford-Brookes University, UK and can be contacted at 11142879 @ brookes.ac.uk or PM right here on SketchUcation should you have any questions.

Anyone no matter where you are can take the survey, and I encourage you to share it.

A separate question for the thread:

When bringing to life a timber based items/buildings/etc. designed in SketchUp, do try to use, or consider using sustainable and certified timber to do so?

I'll give your tips with subdividing the geometry a try.
I messed around with the displacement subdivs and the edge lengths etc already and took it all the way down to 32subdivs. Seemed to provide the best level of detail vs speed. 16 just looked liked a mess although it rendered fast.
Instead of doing the whole render with displacement I took to the old trick of rendering the LC and IR passes without it on, saved them, ran them from file for the final render with the displacement on. Still took a while but much faster than calculating the LC and IR with the displacement on.

I hope that it is just a kink and they are planning on ironing out how vfsu handles CPU management with displacements once Chaos Group decides vfsu is worth their time again.

I'm guessing from the image you are using Light Cache as your secondary?
There is only one situation where I've had this happen to me, not enough ram. (Have you checked your resource monitor when this happens?). When it happened to me the ram counter ticks up and down on the same oscillation over and over again.
My best suggestion is up your ram to at least 6gb, but short of that:
-Change your dynamic memory limit:
Vray Options> System > Dynamic Memory Limit ... reduce it.
-Lower light cache subdivs.
-Or use a different secondary engine (DMC), see what happens.

Hope that helps.

Here is something for someone to solve.
I have a scene renders perfectly fine, at (almost) full CPU usage as long as displacement is switched off. I switch the displacement back on (a single carpet material in this case) and my CPU refuses to run above around 30% for the process...
At first it would seem it is limiting itself to one core, but it would be strictly less than that if that was the case.
The CPU is a Core i7 920XM.
Who has any ideas, theories or wild conjecture as to why this is?

Here are the rules:
-The only component allowed is Susan, no grouping.

1. Make a row of 10 Susans, 1 meter apart.
2. Make a grid of 10 rows, 1 meter apart.
3. Make a cube of 10 grids, 1 meter apart.
4. Make a row 10 cubes, 15 meters apart.
5. Make a grid of 10 rows. etc.

I think you get the idea. Do it till you can do no more and lets see who can make the most.

Post your result number!

My result was 10,000 Susans (on a MacBook pro). Can you do better?

My deformations are not auto updating themselves. Would anyone happen to know why?