#PCACITY / Reflections
12 messages in this thread
Okay Okay Okay!
I think I found a `fast one' you were trying to pull on us! PCACITY does
not use Automatic reflection maps, does it? I rendered a street scene and
all of the windows in show reflections at funny angles. Kind of like you
would see them if viewed from above..
Or am I mission something.
And, no, I have not had a chance to do all of the tutorials yet. But what
I have done, and what I have rendered proves this to be an excellent
upgrade!
Man, is it FAAAAAAASSSSSTTTT…
-Mike.
You got me. We pulled a few tricks on PCACITY because we didn't have
enough RAM to render the 2Kx2K image with all those flat-mirror reflection
maps. It would've taken up something like 120 Megabytes of flat mirrors to
do all the surfaces we needed. Yeesh.
You'll see that the images we DID use for the reflections actually work
quite well… even in animation. You'll see this when you eventually get a
chance to look at the R2 launch video.
– G
Some people are going to have fun when they start using flat reflections
without think fully about what they are doing (or reading the manual
properly) I have a 4k (QCR) file that takes 104M of free disk space to
render and that only uses one map!
well worth the effort though.
– Grahame
Yikes!
Guess you've got a 1GB disk?
-Mike.
Yup. Even though we made it EXCRUTIATINGLY CLEAR in about a half-dozen
places in the manual, there are going to be some people who flat-out refuse
to read the thing. To use 3DSr2 without carefully reading the memory usage
section in the Installation Guide would NOT be a good idea!
The tradeoff in memory is what you get in performance. The speed of our
flat reflections is incredible when compared to raytracing.
Speaking of reflections, I saw some of YOURS in a videotape of the
Edinborough Conference Center! GREAT STUFF!!!! I was extremely impressed.
That was a very complex model… I assume that most of it was done in
AutoCAD, but please enlighten me. The greatest thing about that tape is
how well-designed it is. The voiceover, video footage, and animation work
really well together. It's too bad that you didn't have the final 3DSr2 at
the time so you could use the field-mode rendering features. Wait till you
see that stuff! (you probably haven't gotten the shipping version yet)
I'll be showing your tape now to folks who ask how 3DS could be used for a
really-large architectural project. EXCELLENT WORK!
What's next?
– G
Ohhhhhhhhh.
Glad to know my spec's are still sitting squarely on my face.
BTW, My workstation is now working about 100% (I still have problems with
using 3 serial ports at once)! I rendered a couple of view of PCACITY at
default settings, TARGA+ set at TMODE 12, and the renderings popped out in
about 30 minutes (lots of paging, 16mb RAM).
Is there a way to utilize over 16mb? My vendor tells me that because of
limitations of DOS, pharlap cannot see above this limits. I told him I
thought there was a way. So who's right?
-Mike.
Michael,
We run 486/50s with 64M of RAM using QEMM 6.0x. Believe me, 3DS and
AAPRO see this. Real fun when you have a 52M temporary .FLC, though –
takes a long time to load.
Kevin Krell – Computer Support Associates
We've actually never had a problem accessing all 64Mb of RAM in Compaq,
AST, Gateway, Northgate, Dell, and many other systems that we've seen in
the past couple of years. There are some systems, however, that only take
16Mb on the motherboard. If you put extra memory on the bus in these
machines, Phar Lap doesn't respond well. Hopefully, this is not your
problem, because usually the only solution is to buy another motherboard.
– G
Mike,
Phar Lap provides a true 32-bit operating environment which means 2
raised to the 32nd power or 4 gigabytes of directly addressable memory.
With the virtual memory manager, the "memory" can be either RAM or hard
disk. Although with the very archaic bus design on the PC the paging to
disk is mostly worthless. On true 32-bit hardware virtual memory paging to
the disk is fast enough to be usable. <John E. insert your plug here>
Your vendor has most likely been confused by the MicroSoft hype as
MicroSoft has still refused to recognize that true computing requires
32-bits or more.
Keith
Mike,
DOS's HiMem.sys memory manager *is* limited to 16MB, but DOS is not. Either
don't use a memory manager, or use QEMM 6.x.
Ken ///
Kenneth,
I've found that the HIMEM.SYS driver from windows 3.0 is not limited to
16MB. I was wondering what happened to alot of my memory after I installed
DOS 5.0 because it had replaced the config.sys line with it's own
HIMEM.SYS.
James
James,
Really? I may have to try that. Dos 5's HIMEM.SYS sure won't let me use
all 32 MB of ram in my machine…
Ken ///