Loading time

[ekimmai]

Hi all,

I'm still having problems with the time it takes to load ages.
Yesterday I just added a few extra animations and textures to an age and then went to URU and tried to link in. The progress bar at the bottom of the screen moves fast but then the screen goes black for some 5-10 seconds and then flicks around for another 10 seconds. There is also quite bad lag for some simple animations. I can't think that any of my objects are highly subsurfed or have huge numbers of vertices. So can anyone advise me as to some potential solutions? (Why does URU load relto instantly when there are complex textures and animations in that age?)

Some of my texture files may be oversized - so could that be the problem?
Is there a limit to number of animations in an age?
Should I concentrate purely on vertex numbers?

Thanks!

[boblishman]

The first thing I would do is check that SHADBUF is OFF on ALL your materials ... (though this does tend to cause playing lag/crashing more than slow loading time ... but it is worth checking. It's easy to forget to switch OFF Shadbuf when you create a new material - it is set to ON by default in Blender) .
Animations will grind to a halt with Shadbuf enabled on any of the animated objects textures - and also if you have too many animated objects parented together ...

When checking your materials, remember that you may have more than one material on an object (it's easy to miss those!). The best way is to use the Outliner window to select and check ALL of your materials (one at a time with the buttons window also open ... you can quickly zip through them all and just glance at the buttons window for each material)

of course, it may be something completely different ... but it's a place to start ...

Texture files should be kept as small as is practical for a given object. You should certainly not have many textures over 512 x 512. Large textures will increase loading time (as they make the prp files larger. How big are your prp files?

Also, keep your polygon (faces) count to an absolute minimum. Although newer machines can cope better, it's still unnecessary to use high polygon objects. Most "detail" can be done using textures (rather than the actual shape of the mesh) and having hundreds of thousands of polygons (faces) in your Age will also slow loading time (because that will also increase the size of the prp file(s). Whilst the plugin will refuse to export a single object with more than (IIRC) 10, 000 faces, if your Age has lots of (duplicated?) objects with polygon counts over 1000 ... you'll soon find that you have an Age with several hundred thousands of faces ... which is not good.

Maybe you could post the size of your prp files ? ... that may give us a clue ...

[ekimmai]

Wow thanks BMan - I never knew about the Outliner window - what a great tool for checking all kinds of settings and locating those unwanted duplicate objects! I appreciate all the detail in your explanation which really helped.

Pretty much all my materials had Shadbuf turned on so I turned them all off. Reduced texture images.
PRP files were previously: MainRoom 8MB, Textures 6MB. Now: MainRoom 6.5MB and Textures 1.5MB (since I have stripped out a few objects as a test).
6.5MB is not that big is it?

Result: absolutely no difference to loading time or lag.
I was so optimistic as well but clearly there is another issue here which still goes undetected. Any more ideas??

[ekimmai]

Okay, think I have got rid of the loading delay
It seems problem is all due to doors which I had animated and had total of 1150 vertices being moved simultaneously (and lit by a spotlight if that makes any difference). Reducing these doors to the bare minimum faces has completely removed any delay or lag.
I never expected that this number of vertices could produce so many problems!

Now the only drawback is that my doors look ghastly. So can I create an image of my good doors in order to apply this to my simpler models?

[boblishman]

yes ... and in fact, you SHOULD always make models this way.

All your models should be really quite BASIC in shape, and then the "detail" - (moulding, carving, etc) is done with the texture, NOT actually the mesh.

Even if you have a quite "complicated" design (say, for example, carved see-thru panels with an intricate design, that would be done by using a texure with a transparancy for the carved out bits ... so the "carved" panels would be a simple (double-sided) plane with the texture mapped onto it.

This is particularly true of animated meshes ... the more polygons ... the more lag ... (as you have found out ... )

... glad you got it sorted

(if you need some help with getting your doors to look "good" again ... you are wellcome to pm me and I can try and help you to fix them)