CompuServe Messages

Sanford, >>I agree that Phar Lap should be fixed or abandoned. Is it really the only game in town? This limitation on scene size is the one thing that really upsets me about 3D Studio. << What limitation on scene size do you mean? Large files that will not fit in RAM _will_ page to disk and yes this is slower than RAM. That is not a Pharlap problem, that is just the nature of RAM vs disk storage. It is unfortunate that Pharlap does not have the ability to switch back to RAM-only addressing after you have forced the system into swap mode addressing. However this is really not a problem for animation, since the next frame rendered will switch back to swap mode anyway. It is only a problem when you are interactively rendering. In that case you should keep two copies of your texture maps in different directories. One normal res and one _very_ low res for test renders. Then just change the map paths depending on which type of rendering you are doing. On most models it is the texture maps that cause the model to exceed RAM, though it sounds like your models are biased more towards complex geometry. Have you tried Optimize? >>The flic problem seems to come and go but it is less troublesome since I got 20 megs of ram. My 8 meg machine is hopeless.<< I haven't had that particular problem with FLIC rendering, but 8 MB is not much RAM for rendering. We use 32MB as a minimum production spec. Strange things sometimes happen when you are crammed into such a small amount of RAM. Also, I don't suppose that virtual RAM is as stable as real RAM. I don't know, but I would guess that rendering FLICs probably takes more RAM than rendering to individual frames. Terry Gilbert Forcade & Associates