CompuServe Thread

#autovis help

2 messages in this thread
#70641From: mark vanderlynDec 9, 1993 8:59 PM
To any users of Autovision: I need help!! I have been experiencing an Autovision Nightmare. First of all is there any way to speed the thing up without having to use only the AVE render or Quick render. I am use to the 3DS phong rendering and I can't believe how slow Autovision is when in eighter of it's ray tracing modes. I am working off of a Gateway 2000 4DX-66v. The graphics card is the ATI Ultra Pro with 1MG of VRam. The other major problem is that the ACADR12 locks up when ever I attempt to render anything more complex then a soapbox. I like being able to work inside Autocad but after losing several hours work my paients are a little thin. I have tried to lowering the res. down to 800×640, but then the material editor will not show the materials correctly on the sphere. The rendering driver is a Vibrant Graphics DLXpress.exp. If any one has a suggestion as to how to enhance proformance I would like to here from you. I know I could get a second meg of vram and several more megs of ram and it run better. I was hoping that there might be another way other then a hardware solution. , Mark in Beantown
#70747From: Michael DakanDec 10, 1993 11:00 AM
AutoVision performance seems to be very sensitive to shadows – as you've discovered. With shadows turned on, with or without ray-tracing, you need to be very careful about the materials you use. Materials that use a bitmap as a bump map seems to result in AV trying to cast more shadows than it can handle. When I first started to look at AV, I made the mistake of using the Vines (or some name similar to that) as a ground cover, and got a rendering time of over six hours. Using a smoother material improved the situation, but it's still just pretty slow if you want to cast shadows… As far as lock-ups – I don't know. Maybe if you are real short of memory… You ought to have 12-16mb, I think, to use AV. You might also try a different video driver, or look for an upgraded Vibrant driver… More video ram won't do anything for you, except to allow you to render to even higher resolution on screen, and that would be counterproductive for performance. I think an overall performance improvement is going to have to wait for a future release of AV, after they do some render-engine optimization for it…