CompuServe Messages

Spent most of this weekend working on this animal, and I think I may have identified the problem. Noticed in some frames, at some camera angles, I got a black piece of nothing, with surrounding objects and mapping intact. If you are familiar with Stephen Kings writings, I like to call it the Langolier effect. A Langolier consumed "past tense" and left a black void of nothing in it's wake. The geometry affected was the flat surface of a box, that had a river bed running through it that was created by doing a Boolean subtraction. buildings sitting on top of this flat earth surface, seemed to be the source of this black nothing projection across it's surface. But, the object by itself with all others hidden would have a "hunk of nothing" running through it, at certain camera angles. The Langolier effect was really interfering with some views in my animation, and I narrowed it down to a building that had been made by boolean operations. Once I got rid of the building, and replaced with non-boolean object, the Langolier effect went away. Now back to the problem of render lockup. it still persisted, even with sucessively smaller project files (less faces, less vertices…etc.). The smaller the file, the less the occurence. When I replaced the "Boolean" objects with simpler ones where possible, no lockup occured. My feeling is that the boolean objects caused the lockup, as one of the symptoms, along with the intermittent "Langolier" effect. Why? who knows, what was special about these boolean objects? They weren't clean. instead of nice simple joins and subtractions with clearly defined faces, I had some very wierd and very small vertices and faces occur. For instance, I added a long narrow addition with a lower roof-line to one side of a building, it was supposed to be the same length, it wasn't. It was a clean join at the front, but at the back, it may have extended .001 inches or less (maybe a little more…could not measure reliably). Is this a problem for 3DS, Hardware, or Graphics subsytems? Would this generate a "langolier" effect intermittently, or cause lockup? Could the fact that I have a flawed pentium chip be of any importance? Maybe this will be useful, let me know what you think. Mason