#MicroBot Design Disk
18 messages in this thread
Has anyone figured out what to do with the MicroBot Design Disk from Antic?
What kinds of programs can use those objects? I tried loading the
Anthrobot into Sculpt-Animate 3-D on a 2.5 meg A1000 and couldn't even load
it. On Turbo Silver I could load it but I couldn't render it in 'Solid
Model' mode although I could 'Full Trace' it. I think Antic should warn
users, somewhere on the outside of the box, that you need at least 2.5 meg
to render most of the example robots and that you probably need 4.5 meg to
render the two very complex ones.
Gregg – Aha! You found the major flaw in the Antic disks. The problem is
that the ST CAD programs do not use phong shading, consequently they
usually contain about a "BZILLION" (Leo Schwab's term) triangles to get a
smooth surface. We are currently converting the disks into Turbo SIlver
format, and the TSilver versions will be 60% less dense. Don't flame the
Antic folks too bad though they probably didn't realize the problem. I
know you aren't going to like to hear it, but it seems that most of the
serious rendering programs are going to require goo-gobs of memory to
perform properly, especially on large complex objects. I know 2.5MB seems
like alot of memory, but to be honest in the world of 3D rendering it
isn't. I have 7MB in my own system at home and have created cells that I
can't render either. Knowing that the 020 will address about 1/2 GIG of
RAM that's what I want! In addition to being able to render anything, I't
would keep my house nice and warm during the long cold Minnesota winters!
I have rendered (as seen in LIB 11 ) the Antic Robot objects and used 3 meg
to do so………………Louis
Lou – we have heard from a lot of users who seem to have problems around
the 2 to 2.5 MB point. Once you get to 3+ MB problems seem to diminish as
your RAM increases from that point. <– Stan
Wouldn't it be possible to render images with less memory, but at a greatly
reduced speed? Given the high current price of RAM nowadays, such a
rendering mode would be an added advantage, IMHO. –>Steve Bennett
Unfortunately it's not a variable. We use a true Octree system prior to
the triangle intersector doing it's thing, The larger and more dense the
objects in the scene, the more memory that is required to disperse the
triangles, with a possible 64000 oct volumes being calculated. It akin to
tossing a dry sponge into a bucket of water, the larger the sponge the
more it will expand in the water. As a test, I built a 50,000 triangle
terrain object (one single object) on disk, it was about 1.2MB, but it
needed just under 9MB to render. <–Stan
What's an Octree system? I'm familiar (or thought I was) with most of the
Ray tracing theory, but this is new to me. Sounds a bit like some hidden
object removal schemes used for 3D rendering without ray tracing, but I
wouldn't think such a scheme would be needed in ray-tracing, so I doubt
that's it… I almost hesitate to suggest the possibility of virtual
memory… <grin> –>Steve Bennett
Steve – Octrees are simply a method of subdividing the screen into 64000
cubes (ram permitting). The triangles are then dispersed through the
Octvolumes, effectively allowing our triangle intersector routines to deal
with the volumes independantly. If there are no triangles in any specific
volume, (like the sky) the tracer whips through it to the next volume.
Using true Octree subdivison as Turbo Silver does, is one of the reasons
(There are others) why TSilver is considerably faster that the other folks
out there. < — Stan
Stan, you forget that the Antic object disks were designed for use in a one
meg ST system. It's the Amiga 3D programs that are pigs in terms of memory
use. When I converted these disks for Antic, I made them well aware of the
large number of triangles in the objects. By comparison with some of the
other objects available from other companies on the Amiga, they aren't too
bad. For example, consider a work with ten or twelve letters from the
Fancy Font disks – the resulting object is often larger than many of the
Antic objects. Besides, the Antic objects are also good for splitting into
"spare parts", because the arm of a robot can often be used for other
things.
The only criticism I really had about the ANtic objects was the density of
triangles, They could probably be about 40% or more less dense for use in
Turbo Silver. We are finishing up a routine that tries to intelligently
reduce what TSilver shouldn't need in the objects. <– Stan
For any rendering mode that doesn't have Phong shading, the extra triangles
make sense. Atari CAD-3D didn't have any Phonglike shading modes. Neither
does VideoScape 1.0, Sculpt Painting mode, sketch mode, etc. To use
smoothing modes, you require lots of extra time, in most programs. Just
because Turbo Silver is the fastest… 🙂 It depends on the object, some
faces could be removed if you have smoothing options.
Of course you know very well, I'm just being a S**T head about it, but as
long as we have the fastest rendering engine out there so far, and we know
that our (Tsilver) worst enemy is extremely high triangle density, I just
can't live with the objects in their current format. Also bringing in them
in via current Interchange, from either Sculpt or VideoScape format looses
any heierarchy in the object. In our effort to remain the "Good Guys" out
there, the least we can do is break the objects down, and clean them up a
little bit. <– Stan
Hierarchies aren't really present in the CAD-3D objects. The objects are
separated into pieces, but there is no notion of the "hand-bone connected
to the leg-bone" – that's all done in a separate script for the
Cyber-whatever interpreter. Also, if we had converted the objects to
Sculpt Animate format, that is, with the hierarchies, the objects would
have been too bulky to all fit on one disk. For VideoScape, it is so
difficult to make hierarchical objects – and it wasn't even possible
(really) in VS 1.0. However, our in-house CAD-3D converter does handle the
separate objects, so if we convert to Turbo Silver, the objects *are*
separate. Antic is talking to us about converting to your format,
however.
I stand corrected regarding the hierarchies. Actually I would prefer it if
Syndesis would do the conversion, as some stuff is starting to creep into
our schedule, that may make the time to do it hard to find. As long and the
objects can be broken down into their seperate parts, the user could then
define his/her own hierarchy. I would still like to see lots of them damn
triangles removed however. < — Stan
Hi I bought the Human design disk in the videscape 3D format and I am
trying to convert that to Sculpt format using Interchange and it works with
small objects, but I'am missign parts of the object when transfering big
files like the Righthand. I get only 1 or 2 fingers… the ther rest is
only dotted, not lined!
It sounds like a bug we squashed about six or eight months ago. You should
send in your master InterChange disk to Syndesis, and we'll update you to
the latest versions of everything. If you have any other InterChange
modules, such as Turbo Silver or Forms In Flight, be sure to send those,
too.
The Microbot objects are very large, and some old versions of the Sculpt
module had trouble with large objects.
I've loaded the Anthrobot in a 2.5 meg machine without troubles. Are you
running other programs that could be consuming memory? Antic was supposed
to have a warning sticker about recommended memory. Wasn't there any
notice of this on your box?
There wasn't any mention of memory on my box. I bought them for one of my
roommates who only has 1meg. I have 4.5 so I can render them but it's not
easy.