CompuServe Messages

I have 32MB of ram. This is sufficient for 80% of the stuff i do.The problem on the other 20% is not so much in rendering animations,because although paging to disk is slower, the same swap file is used so frame times remain constant. For example a scene that requires 40mb and creates a 10mb swap file might require 9 minutes per frame to render rather than 6 minutes if it dosnt page. I got these figures on my 486/50 by optimizing the meshes in the scene so it wouldnt page. The whole thing takes 1/3 longer to render but thats not a huge problem for me since I dont have tight deadlines. The thing that drives me crazy is testing frames of an animation when disk paging is required. Then you have to reboot between tests or render times get longer and longer. I understand some forum members get around this problem by using OS/2, others buy more ram. If you intend to do complex scenes (who dosnt? ) then I would guess that 64mb would be great, 32mb fine for most work(depending on the work) and 16mb the minimum I would recommend. Another factor to consider is that a lot of great 3D work depends on extensive 2D work in Photoshop or Painter to create realistic texture maps. Its really obvious when someone uses generic small maps because the work looks like cheap computer graphics. Good maps require work in apps like photoshop which also work much better with more ram. For example a 4mb image becomes over twice as big in Pshop because of the undo buffer which would slow work down as paging is required. For graphics work in general I would think of 16mb ram as minimal . Hope this helps Ed