CompuServe Messages

Hello Sanford The largest file Ive worked on so far is 167000 faces 84000 verts. Its an 1890s Doctor/Dentists office and some objects, like the dentists chair, are pretty big. I got rid of about one third of the faces using the Optimize Ipas routine at the angle setting of 2 which is conservative. I cant tell the difference in the look of the optimized objects when rendered so I didnt need the extra faces. This file takes about 9 minutes to render and requires about 12MB more than the 32MB Ive got. I was really upset when the rendering times went up ( 9, 13, 23, etc.)This was for single test renderings. When I rendered 20 frames at once the rendering times held steady at 9 min. So my conclusion is that the swap file limitation is a pain and customers of Pharlap like Autodesk should pressure them to improve their product. On the other hand, once testing is done and continuous rendering begins, I havnt had a problem (yet). I have complained and was told that it isnt a 3DS problem but a Pharlap design limitation. Besides Optimize Ive tried to keep file size down by substituting maps for geometry when possible. For example, in this doctors office a map of microscopes and bottles could be in the glass doored shelves rather than objects. I make different resolutions of the same maps and use the small ones for video and the large ones (up to 3 to 8MB) for Iris print output. I also figured out how to make seamless maps for tiling in Photoshop, which saves space. Theres a good description of seamless tile making in the Fractal Painter companion which would have saved me some time if I had read it first. Eventually I'll get another computer and make sure it will hold 128MB of RAM. Of course, I used to think 32MB was a fair amount. Regards, Ed