Tony

I would change the trees. They are obviously billboards and kill the overall image for me. The building looks nice!

IC, half an hour? If you can model and texture that in 1/2 an hour with the amount of details in the photo, I would like to hire you! Tony

One thing to consider about vray lightcache is that it is multithreaded. So the more cpu's on your main system the faster it will calculate. In 1.5 they are saying that it will also be DR capable. Tony

Unless you use WINXP 64 there is very little point in using 4 gig of ram. Even with the 3gig switch it will not use much above 2.3 gig of physical memory for your applications.

It's very simple. Updrade to XP PRO or live with what you have now. I would go a step further and recommend going to XP 64 bit with a dual core X2. It's very stable and you can use 4 gig of memory without concerns about stability of the system. I have switched all my machines to XP 64 bit and very happy that I did. If you work with large scenes, thats the way to go.

As quizzy said, you have to use xp pro to get the full use of a dual processor system.

I have three xt's and it's the same on all of them, MAX8. But on my XEON 2.8 no such problem. Hopefully MAX will address this in a point release.

This is an architectural site. That is probably why your not getting a lot of comments. Try evermotion or CGTalk for more responces on this type of render.

jaggies is when the edges of objects look like the tooth edge of a saw. The edges of the second image have them real bad. It's an anti-aliasing issue. Up your AA to get rid of them.

if it's Zuliban, it's not vray. He uses Maxwell now.

Here's an update. Still not to happy with the walkway. I tried the brick pattern but it just didn't look right to me.

You have got to be kidding!!

Oluv - I'm working on the grass. I'm having problrms with vray displacemnt on my farm. I really want to try and stay away from opacity maps for the trees, takes to long to render with a lot of trees. Still working on the trees. Rick - Good thought, I'll try opening up the scene. I'm going to add a lot more trees to scene but I don't want to get to far from the house. If I do you can't see all the detail it took me quite some time to model.

Joel, I appreciate the comments and as I'm not an architect, what would you recommend for the steps in front of the house besides the material. The steps don't have to have the retaining wall. I just felt it needed something a little different. Would it be better without the retaining wall and just steps of some kind? Travis- are you suggesting doing away with the retaining wall and using the brick material for above ground steps? What would you suggest? I really appreciate the input on this. I won't to learn as much about exterior setup as I can from this personal project. I'm sure my clients would appreciate that as well. I've looked at a few victorians on the net since my post but nothing I've seen so far really looked right. Tony

Yeap, I agree. The stairs in the forground were a bit rushed. Actually, I couldn't come up with a descent design that I liked. I'll look on the net for something more appropriate to the house. Can anyone point me to some descent background files, free or not, as you can tell, I need them. Very rarely do I render exterior scenes and when I have,they always came with a landscaping plan. I need to hit the books and learn some landscaping techniques for times when they don't. This is my first scene with the onyx plants and trees and they still need a lot of work to look more realistic. The poly count is very high, I just need a little more time with the program to get the poly count down and they still look descent. More variation in the plants would help as well. Lack of experience with onyx means high counts and little variation. I'll work on it. Thanks, I'll keep at it. Tony