#Introduction
34 messages in this thread
Introduction
Let me introduce myself.
My name is (as you can see) Henri Witteveen. I am 41 years old. My nationality
is dutch and I also live in Holland.
I studied electric engeneering and I am allowed to use B.Sc behind my name.
Although I studied electric engineering
I have a job as a senior software consultant for a department of the Dutch
government. I have been doing this for
a couple of years now an at the moment I'm trying to start my own computer
animation company (want to do
something else).
This is a result of meeting 3D Studio in august 1994. Since I started playing
with 3D studio I got more and more interested
in 3D computer animation. It's one of the greates software products I've ever
seen.
I hope this will help you getting to know me a little bit better.
Hope to hear from you
Bye
Glad to meet you, Henri. I, too, think that 3DS is one of the greatest
software products I have ever seen (actually, I think it's the greatest).
Here you'll meet like minded people who are trying to do the best to get and
give answers about 3DS and associated products. Take an active part, make sure
you download all the messages from the various forums you're interested in, and
I'm sure you'll learn as well as help others.
Welcome aboard!
Henri:
Welcome to the forum! By finding AMMEDIA you have found a tremendous
resource. Hope you stick around. BTW, which software package are you using to
interface with Compuserve? I only ask because if you are new to the forum you
may be new to Compuserve and we might be able to save you some money. There are
several scriptable downloaders which will cut your online time down to a
fraction of what it would cost to remain online to read and reply to messages.
Most will also outpace WinCim. Let me know if you need more info.
– Bob Ritger
Bob:
You're right I'm not only new to the forum but also new to Compuserve. The
software I am using to interface to Compuserve is the product WINCIM version
1.4.
If you have some info or tips I would be gratefull.
– Henri Witteveen
Henri:
There are lots of other software packages for accessing CompuServe that are
generally known as "off-line readers". They allow you to automate your online
tasks while not connected to CompuServe. This saves a GREAT deal of money. I
personally use a program called TAPCIS (you can download a fully functional
demo version of this by going GO TAPCIS — I believe registration to the full
version is something like $80US). I believe there is an article on off-line
readers in the latest issue of CompuServe magazine (the US edition, anyway).
I'm sure others here can recommend other programs. WinCIM is okay, and I do us
it occasionally when I'm wanting to do some quick interactive searching for a
certain file, etc, but for general forum-following, DEFINITELY get an off-line
reader!
Dave
(oh, and Welcome to AMMEDIA!)
You can use WinCim 1.4 to read your messages off-line (and automate the
process).
Go to your CSERVE\WINCIM directory and edit the file called WINCIM.INI. In
your [GENERAL PREFERENCES] section put this line:
Auto-Pilot=On
Now when you boot up WinCim you'll see AutoPilot in your Special Menu (at the
top). This will allow you to automatically selection the forums you want for
downloading, send mail from your outbasket, get mail for you, and then auto log
off. It generally takes me about three minutes each day to get all the
messages from the forums I'm interested in (and that's a lot!), so you really
save money.
Let me know if you have any problems/questions (you can also get help on WinCim
in that forum).
Henri:
Well, to save you a pile of guilders (I'm guessing here, its been a while
since I was in your country, I've forgotten the monetary system 🙁 ) I would
offer a couple of suggestions: NavCIS is pretty slick and pretty quick, I've
settled on this one after trying several. If you go DVORAK they have a
downloadable version stored in their library which you could try out now. Other
scriptable downloaders include CSnav, OZwin, TapCIS and GoCIS. They all pretty
much work the same way and are all downloadable from Compuserve. You set up
which forums you wish to visit, which sections of the forums from which you
wish to get messages and with a single mouse click you can have your computer
logon to Compuserve, grab your mail, send outgoing mail, logon to several
forums, grab messages from each one, send messages to each one, download/upload
files and then logoff. This allows you to read and respond to all messages
offline and save you all of that connect time and cut down your phone bill
(I've heard that in areas of Europe that there can be a cost involved for
calling the nearest Compuserve phone number).
Also, you can use WinCim in an 'autopilot' mode but I don't think this is
officially documented. Maybe someone here can offer the trick to this one. It
won't give you all of the features of the packages mentioned above but would
still save you some money.
Again, welcome to AMMEDIA.
– Bob Ritger
>> to interface to Compuserve <<
You might wanna check out NAVCIS also. A "very" functional demo (limited to 5
forums) is available at GO DVORAK. This program fully _pumps_, big-time, dude!
It does _everything_ offline and has a built in spell checker. IMHO, I can't
imagine CIS access being faster. It's available for DOS or Win now and a
Win95/NT version will be out soonly.
– ej
Hey Bob,
I have recently joined also. This is my second day on. Currently, I am using
the plain CIM offered. I would appreciate any info on alternatives.
I hop off and on quite a bit, so maybe I will catch you sometime.
Thanks….
John:
A hearty welcome to you also John! As for forum use I would recommend NavCIS
but I wouldn't toss out WinCIM. Like Dave Rhoten suggested, WinCIM is great for
online and interactive Compuserve usage. NavCIS is available as a demo in
DVORAK forum free for the download. Check it out.
– Bob Ritger
Hi All
Another new kid on the block !
New to Compuserve this forum and 3DSv4, it arrived last Monday.
I have been using V2 for around 6 months at one of my clients and now
have taken the plunge and got myself a copy, so I can do the work here.
It was all going well this week and I have a very nice animation to do
for a new client.
Then yesterday evening I was doing a fli render @ 320×200 as a preview
of the 250 frame animation and BOOM ! it got to frame 105 (?) and crashed
to DOS with an illegal Instruction error. I went home in a dark mood…
When I ran it again this morning I get a memory protection fault
CS:EIP = 000fh:0011305eh ???
Its the weekend and my dealer is not around to hold my hand,
can anyone out there please help ?
3DS was installed right out of the box, just setup for my video card etc.
The machine is a Pentium 90 with 32megs, 1.5 gig scsi H/D video is
diamond stealth 32.
The animation has now just rendered OK ? all I did was to restart 3ds
regards
Tim Coupland, Field of Vision, London, England.
Hi Tim –
Welcome! CIS is a fantastic way to communicate. You will find this forum full
of professional level and hobby users of 3DS and Animator Studio. I got my
first look last night at a tape distributed at SIGGRAPH, a convention in Los
Angeles a while back. What the folks here can do with the software is amazing.
Anne
Tim:
Welcome to Ammedia! So you figure you would just say hello and then drop a
bomb on me, eh? <G> I've actually experienced a simmilar memory protection
fault. It was intermittent as well, hate that. Possibly a leaner startup would
help. Can you clean up the config.sys or the autoexec.bat?
– Bob Ritger
Hi Bob
Well it was a bit sudden I know <G>…
Thanks very much for your reply.
Yes cleaning up the startup was my first move.
I have tried taking out calls to EMM386, that seemed to help, but then as I
said it only happens sometimes !
I have not had it reappear, but I just don't want it to come back when I have
left it to render overnight, with
a next day deadline.
Thanks again
Tim Coupland.
-Tim Coupland
Tim,
At risk of jumping to a wrong conclusion, the reason for your intermittent
crashes _could_ be a too-small FILES= line in your config. I've set mine to
FILES=40, because in the beginning, I was getting seemingly random and
intermittent crashes. Not now!
If by some chance your config doesn't have a FILES= line (therefore using the
default) definitely put this in!
Hope this helps!
SCL
Stephen:
Good heads up on the FILES parameter. I'll store that one away.
– Bob Ritger
Hi Stephen
Thanks for the input, I have got files set to 90 already.
My feeling is that there is something going on with
the Dos extender and some setting that I don't know
about.
or maybe its that dreaded pentium bug <BG>.
regards
Tim Coupland.
-Tim Coupland
Tim,
Do you have any power management TSR's? They have sometimes caused probelms.
Has your system ever rendered this type of file w/o problems? If not,you may
have some hardware conflicts. What type of mem mgr are you using?
Have you tried reseating your memory SIMM'S?
Just some ideas…
– Steve Ormonde
Hi Steve
Thanks for the reply.
I have no power saving TSR's on the system.
The thing renders Ok sometimes, then will just crash to DOS. It is the random
nature of the problem that is making me crazy. This is only for test renders at
320×200
What happens when I my final render at 768×576 …
I thought I had got rid of it by not loading EMM386 on startup. Now I have all
the mesh objects in place the file is large enough that I have also started
getting Page fault crashes. The render is now using all 32meg ram and making a
10meg swap file.
I haven't even added all the lighting yet.
Can Any one from Adesk give me any pointers please.
My dealer says he has been onto tech support but I have had no feedback yet.
I have till end of next week to get this licked, it has to go to edit the week
after that.
Then on air across Europe.
regards
Tim Coupland, Field of Vision, London.
-Tim Coupland
A note to say thanks to all who responded to my plea for help
Adesk say they are 99% sure that it was the vibrant driver
for my Diamond stealth 32 video card.
All I need to do is to download the latest driver, which I am told is v1.08 (
beta ) and the problem will go away…
will keep you informed, thanks again for your interest
and help.
regards
Tim Coupland, Field of Vision, London.
-Tim Coupland
Tim:
>>thanks… will keep you informed <<
I'll be looking to see if your troubles go away with the new drivers.
– Bob Ritger
Hi Bob
Well I have now used the setup and done things that would have broken it have
broken it before, ie. lots of single frame renders at 640×480 to screen then a
flic render to disk.
No problems so far.
The client is in tomorrow, lets hope it behaves
while they are here, not very confidence boosting if the system goes belly up
while showing people how things will look <G>.
Thanks again for your help.
Regards
Tim Coupland, Field of Vision, London.
-Tim Coupland
Tim:
Just checking in to find out how it went with your show and tell with your
client.
– Bob Ritger
Hi Bob
It all went very well, they where thrilled !
The system is behaving much better now, although I did
get a pageing error this morning when rendering a flic to disk, it seems to be
safer to render to tga and then stich
them together.
Just running a last test on some lighting and texture changes the director
made yesterday, then its off to do a full field render to tga overnight ( 30
hours approx ), ready for laying to tape on Monday.
One thing that has become clear to me on this project is that I need to either
upgrade my video card the screen redraws are agony.
My feeling is to get a faster card that will also be suitable for Max as well.
Thanks for your interest.
regards
Tim Coupland, Field of Vision, London.
-Tim Coupland
Tim:
>> it seems to be safer to render to tga and then stitch
them together. <<
Yep, I rely on this method.
>> the screen redraws are agony. <<
Allegedly, Liquid Speed should help you out in this respect. I haven't used
the product but you may be able to get some opinions here on its performance.
Glad to hear that your luck has turned for the better.
– Bob Ritger
Hi Bob
I spoke too soon 🙁
Why is it all hell breaks loose at the weekend ?
The problem I had has gone away, and now I have an even worse one, I can only
render ( about ) ten frames before I get a crash with a memory protection
fault…
I can restart from where it stopped and it does some more frames then gets
stuck for ages on a single frame and then crashes to DOS.
I have tried all the tips in the manual and stuff in the libs here but all to
no avail.
Maybe I need to get some more RAM and that will cure the problem, but today is
Sunday and I have to get this thing ready by tommorow.
I hope the path to Max is better than this upgrade to v4
has been, I had v2 running sweet as a nut here.
regards
Tim Coupland, Field of Vision, London, England.
-Tim Coupland
>> I hope the path to Max is better than this upgrade to v4 <<
Tim,
Sounds like you could have hardware problems, there is nothing reported in R4
that crashes like that.
And on a Sunday, to boot (oops, sorry<G>)
Good luck
-Ted Boardman
Ted / Tim:
I have a render slave or two that intermittently crash to DOS with r4. I get
a memory protection fault error CIS HEAP or some such garbage on a couple of
machines. One thing that I have found true is that the more complex (ie. more
RAM intensive) the more likely the machine will crash. Similar machines (same
RAM and CPU speed) do not behave the same way. As a matter of fact they render
fine and swap like crazy but always finish the task. I suspect that what is
ailing Tim is also at work on my network as well.
– Bob Ritger
Hi Ted
Yes, this is very messy, if I boot with anything other that that required to
keep my scsi drive happy and try
to video post render, I get a crash to DOS with a memory
protection error.
I managed to optimise the mesh so that it did not use any kind of swap file,
now at least I can render the whole animation in one hit.
I guess that it must be some kind of memory clash, but how do I find out what
is hitting 3DS ?
The DOS or 3DS manuals are far from comprehensive in this area.
regards
Tim Coupland.
-Tim Coupland
Welcome to the forum, Henri. You'll be amazed at the amount of info that you
can learn here by reading every msg. in the forum every day. If you want to
learn 3DS, you've come to the right place.
Welcome,
In addition to what's been said, you'll find like I did that most of the
questions you might have, have already been asked and are part of some thread
in this forum. But for that you have to get an offline reader like Bob Ritger's
Tapcis, or I use Navcis. The level of activity and competence here in this
forum is waaaaayyyyy superior that what you could find anywhere else.
I've got to take the opportunity to congratulate the team running the show all
the FA( forum assistants ) and everyone who everyday, takes the time to answer
some distress calls.
Henri I've got 7 message sections that Navcis goes and gets all new activity
since the last time. Well the 1st time it downloaded 2000 messages. Took me 2
weeks to go through all and understand <g> then I went back online and 2000
more messages come down. Now I'm caught up and it's about 50-100 per day.
Anyway this is the best course I've taken, and I'll be on it until I die!
Bob Kohl
Cedille inc.
-Bob Kohl
Bob:
>> But for that you have to get an offline reader like Bob Ritger's Tapcis, or
I use Navcis. <<
Actually I've been using Navsis SO for the past couple of months and find it
to be the best that I have tried. I never gave Tapcis a real try although
there are those who swear by it. I think a new version (6?) has been released.
>> I've got to take the opportunity to congratulate the team running the show
all the FA( forum assistants ) and everyone who everyday, takes the time to
answer some distress calls. <<
Thanks for the kind words, they are much appreciated!
– Bob Ritger
Bob,
I've ventured in some other forums online, to check them out, as well as
telling other people to log on to their forum of interest. But I must admit
some of them are quite a mess, and/or very deceiving (i.e. lots of threads with
1 question, no answers etc…), or there are no FA's ( sort of like Internet's
"Free for all" but I'm not here to start a war !<g>).
I know Anne is relocating posts where they go. And all of that happens
backstage where none of us sitting in front row have a clue of what's going on.
But the results of this continuous effort shows in a big way when you compare
to others. You can be proud.
Plus it's the best "support/help" because no-one is talking 1 product but more
systems and compatibility, (sort of like a "complete service center" instead of
"just a brake shop".)
The cumulated experience of all by far surpasses any magazine/benchtest/or
other media source available.
I just hope one day I'll be able to help others out, but for now I'm still
"GREEN" but not "ALONE" and that's what feels good.
If I had to base my knowlegde on local support well I'd be trying to locate a
"frame-buffer" card and going from shop to shop trying to convince some one
there are VCR's out there that record frame-by-frame!!!
So back to my system, how many leaves an hour do I feed my mice to keep that
little wheel turning on my generator to keep my Sinclair ZX-81 running <BG>.
Bob Kohl
Cedille inc.
-Bob Kohl
Bob:
>> If I had to base my knowlegde on local support well I'd be trying to locate
a "frame-buffer" card and going from shop to shop trying to convince some one
there are VCR's out there that record frame-by-frame!!! <<
You're cracking me up! 🙂 Yep, the latest technology and 3DS news is always
found here. I'm surprised at how many Autodesk dealers don't avail themselves
of this forum. The ones that do are so much more in tune to the latest
developments. Take Kevin Krell for instance, his company is winning awards
for their superior service. It is no wonder as Kevin is here on the AMMEDIA
forum daily absorbing and dispensing words of wisdom.
– Bob Ritger