CompuServe Messages

Hi Bill, A few tips for building projects and reducing resource strain. — minimize how many lights are casting shadows, I find that I can usually get the effects I want by having 3 or less lights casting shadows – remember, in real life the more lights you have the fewer shadows you get because the shadows casted by a light are being filled by the other lights in the scene. — Make good use of the images you load in to use as resources for materials. For example, with a marble texture you can create many diffrent types and colors of marble, ar you could use it as a reflect texture to create many types of metalic materials. Remember Images take a lot of resources – which brings me to my next tip- — Convert the images on your disk that you are going to use for material construction into 256 col images (I save them as GIF files because its a compressed format that is always 256 col, so if I load a GIF I know its a 256 col file). This will cut the file size of the image by two thirds (aprox.). The proccess of rendering with highlights and shadows as well as other atributes you set effectively masks the fact that you are useing a 256 col file. In other words you can't see the difference. — If you are only rendering a 640×480 BMP file and the object that you are applying a texture to is only in one eighth of the picture, there is no use in using a bitmap for that texture that is a 640×480 image. Reduce it to somthing like 160×120 or of that is two small then 320×240. — Finaly save your rendered resources to disk and then del them from your eyes file. You will still have the image on disk but it won't be taking up resources the next time you load the project. Hope these help, Brian Edgin Visual Software Product Specialist P.S. – I learned it all from Nick! 🙂