Shell 232 RAD progress

[Robert The Rebuilder]

It's quite a remarkable feat, especially considering this is your first age. Well done, Katreeny!

One suggestion for decreasing the load time would be to lower the polygon count in your model. Just out of curiosity, what is the total number of polygons for your shell? [BTW: if you load it into Blender and make all your layers visible, the polygon count is shown at the top right, where it says "Fa:###" (or "Faces").]

[katreeny]

Er. In the entire shell, something in excess of 88 thousand... I think this might be the problem

The benches have some heavy subsurfing to smooth them from the original boxy shape - so of course every copy has all those extra polygons.

Katreeny

[Aloys]

hmm yes, that's a little too much. But then again there are no firm rules regarding polygon count in the shells..
The problem is that by setting a strict limit to polycount (or even textures) I fear some people might bescared away or might feel too restricted.. Beside it's hard to settle on a limit when there are other things that can change that number like visregions and PRP paging.
I've been wanting to write an article or a FAQ entry about that for a while, but I still can't decide on how to put it best..

For now we'll enjoy you highly detailed shell as it is.

[Grogyan]

I believe the rough limit was 25MB for the prp, or was that just part of an estimation on a possible limit.

BTW because the extra faces generated when using subsurf, you should limit its use and instead use as low poly as possible and use the "SetSmooth" button.

We live and learn by our mistakes, quote from Einstein I believe

[Trylon]

I usually subsurf first and decimate later

[D'Lanor]

If the mesh is non-manifold the decimate modifier will not work. I have successfully used the poly reducer script in such circumstances.

[katreeny]

Well, hopefully I can find a way to keep the shape without forcing people to go have a coffee and watch TV for a while until the shell loads!

It's still better than the version with the dynamic shadows everywhere... not only did that take forever to load, it was like walking in glue. Special effects are nice, but that's probably a bit TOO special.

Katreeny

[Aloys]

Well 88000 is indeed a good amount of faces, as a reference the whole Relto Age has around 100.000 faces. So that means that when you come close to your shell Uru needs to unload a bunch of things, and then load something almost as large as Relto on top of what\'s already loaded. That explains the loading times.

After this contest is over, sometime next week, I will take an hour or two to write an article about polygon counts, and the things to do to keep it low (and those to avoid).. Hopefully that\'ll help a number of people.