Render Lockup
Don,
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?
What do you think; however, from now on I will be careful with my
Booleans, and use many "Sub-projects" to keep complexity down. I already use
mapped imagery in place of geometry when I can.
Mason