#Not enough RAM
Firstly, thanks David for your lengthy reply, a sign that you genuinely want to
help !!!
Please allow me to give you some background to my hardware/software, me and my
problem !
I have a 486/DX4/100, 16MB ram and I have AutoCAD v12 windows and 3DSv4.
I am trying to teach myself how to use these wonderful products, but will be
attending night school to learn AutoCAD next week (I have been teaching myself
for about 1 month in the evenings/weekends).
As a way of teaching myself, I set myself the target of drawing – as accurately
as possible – a replica of my mountain bike (in 3d).
The plan was (and still is) to draw the bike in Autocad and then export it to
3ds for rendering and possibly animating (something simple like having a camera
circle the bike).
When I first started drawing the bike in Autocad, obviously my knowledge of the
software was a lot less then than it is now and some of the objects I drew back
then were drawn "inefficiently" (sorry I can't think of a better word). By
inefficient I mean, for example, drawing the down tube of the frame of the bike
with SURFTAB1 and SURFTAB2 values unneccesarily high. At that time I didn't
consider that that kind of oversight would cause me problems later on (but slow
redraws and regens etc have taught me otherwise !). I would have thought that
these high values would have contributed to the large size of the drawing but I
am not all together sure.
The reason I mention my SURTAB1/2 problem is that I've also done a similar
thing with setting my wire density to 12 all the time (rather than setting it
to a value neccessary to do the job) for other entities. My inexperience at the
time meant that I didn't know what a suitable value for SOLWDENS ought to have
been.
Which brings me to my problem !!
At one point my bike was looking great (I'd say 75% finished) but over the
weekend I decided to replace the bike's "slick" tyres which I'd drawn (at that
time with my knowledge then – plines amd revsurf) with what was really on the
bike, i.e. tyres with real tread blocks (my knowledge now included
Pline/extrude/solwire/solmesh).
Hence the "1000 new entities" in my drawing (the tyre treads).
As my knowledge of AutoCAD continues to grow, I have three regrets about the
drawing of my bike;
1) I wish I had not created certain entities with such high values
of SURFTAB1/2
2) I wish I had not created certain entities with such high values
of Wire Density.
3) That I never created one layer and called it "temp" (purely to be
used for constructing).
Number 2) I think I can get away with and redo but 1) would be a nightmare
(though not impossible) to redo (because I erased all construction lines to
create them).
When I said in my earlier message that 3DS would not load the 1000 or so AME
solids, what actually happened was that 3dS just gave the message "Currently
loading 1 Object from file, please wait" – and wait I did (around 45 minutes
before I concluded that this wasn't working).
David, thanks for your help, I understand what you are saying but I still don't
know how to identify if I am trying to export something that has over 64,000
faces. Please explain !
I've never tried "bringing each layer" into 3ds (by this do you mean that I
could import say layers called Tyres, brakes, wheels etc and end up with a bike
in 3ds – if so how do I do that in 3ds. Or are you merely saying do this so
that I can identify which layer is giving me problems ?).
Many thanks for your help and have a pleasant day,
Jez