Does anyone know what the max draw distance for the game is? I mean for models, obviously, not terrain.

what is a 'draw distance' exactly..?

What is the maximum distance at which polygons wil be rendered? I realize that this can be set from the sky file, but there must be a maximum that the game can handle.

aren't you talking about the View Distance? As far as I've noticed, the bar under Options or whatever and not the brightness will have the settings for how 'close' to you the polygons must be to get rendered by your machine

Draw distance is a more generic term that appies to all games that use polygonal raster endering.

I need to know what the maximum that the engine can handle is, because I'm contemplating making the terrain for a map in XSI, so I need to know the limitations.

For example, the larget prop ever made, the SSD, was 15 km in length, right? Could all of it be seen?

rofl

no

as I said, it's an option made from the user, which there is a bar from 0-100 or something (never had it lower than 40 xD lol)
Bandu once made that huge one, played the map, flew out, and made a sandwich for a few minutes and got back and it had almost flewn there but he said barely half of it was visible.

you COULD try to make a huge object; 100 grids in XSI, 1000, 2000, 5000, 10000 etc. Then you could tell us if you could actually SEE everything in one of them then experiment a bit...

Okay. My terrain isn't going to be very big, but it's going to be in a canyon, so I need to make it in XSI. The way that my planning is going, it's going to be about 500 or so units long.

Fair enough. But I think it can render up to 4 KM's then

But it's probably written somewhere in a .sky file

like the canyons from star wars battlefront tatooine dune sea