Turtle Isle (age problems)

[ametist]

This looks very good dendwaler! And those flow ring cactuses , really like them. Hope to soon be able to visit !

[Jojon]

Wait for your A'Tuin!
*elbows his way to the head of the queue* ;P

Hmm, on second thought, it may not be that good an idea to let explorelephants into the china shop. :7

[dendwaler]

Wait for your A'Tuin!
*elbows his way to the head of the queue* ;P

Hmm, on second thought, it may not be that good an idea to let explorelephants into the china shop. :7

He Magi !, don't expect to meet your friend Rinzwind or his luggage on Turtle Isle.
Oh boy, i have not been reading "Terry Pratchett" 4 Ages. lol
What about 4 Urwin's instead of elephants carrying this Discworld?

Anyway thx, it reminds me on a good one liner from Terry for my sig.

[dendwaler]

My knowledge of Alcscript is limited,
so i may be asking for something already excist.
If so, please help me in the good direction.

I have to reduce the number of vertices in my age, because it only runs with high-end videocards.

An obtion would be to find a way to split the age in various regions.
for instance:
when being inside a building you don't have to render the landscape outside the building.
What i want is a "renderdetection" area , something equal to the swimdetection.
When you enter the detection area every object inside that area will be rendered and outside not.
Overlapping areas would be necessary in some cases or a list of objects that will always be rendered.

Is this possible already?
Can it be solved with multiple page files?
or with visible regions and softvolumes?

[Chacal]

The answer to your questions is probably yes.
However these are not the only options.
You should first consider other options:
1 - getting rid of what causes the overload. It is possible that there is a problematic object, texture, or effect. Do you use an environment map? transparency? specularity? Try the Age after deleting suspect objects.

2 - actually reducing the number of vertices. Have you used subsurfing? Are you aware that you can probably get rid of 75% of vertices without imparing the visual quality of the Age, by a judicious use of texturing? Look at Cyan's meshes, see how simple they usually are.

[dendwaler]

Hi Chacal,

I can't get rid of what causes the overload, because it is essential.
I did use some subsurfing for the isle itself, but that is not a problem,because every object else is build with primitives.
I used planes, boxes ,cilinders, etc., and used "knife cutting" instead of boleans to reduce vertices to the max.

But even when doing that, with an age sized 3800 * 3800 blender units its hard to stay within the limits.

The good thing is that i finally understand how to make proper use of soft volumes and visible regions.
(found it, after reading many old threads)
What i did wrong was that i actually made a "region" to refer to instead of a "soft volume".
I was not aware of the PyPRP soft volumes script which is available under the add button in the top bar. (its not mentioned anywhere!)
Normally i never use that add button, i always use the space bar to add objects, but that SV function is not implemented there.

It works now for a few objects.
I am curious what the performance gain will be when i am finished with a very systematic approch.
First i made a sort of "Rubics cube" around the whole world and parted it into several adjacent soft volumes.
Every object now gets a little script from within which volume it must be visible.

Lots of work, but it might be worth it.

[dendwaler]

I have a serious problem when exporting my age.
When finalizing the export I get a memory error during saving the texture.prp file.
I have 4 GByte memory installed in w7 32bit.
When the error occurs, about 3.3 is used, which is around the maximum adressable amount of Ram.

Is pyprp looking for the amount of memory it may use.?

I am searching for a way to get around this problem, without having to erase objects.

[diafero]

Which version of PyPRP are you sing? Version 1.6 had some memory error fixes.

Besides, how many textures do you have that are really large (I am told that 512x512 is quite large already)?

[dendwaler]

Which version of PyPRP are you sing? Version 1.6 had some memory error fixes.

Besides, how many textures do you have that are really large (I am told that 512x512 is quite large already)?

I use the latest 1.6
most of my textures are up to 256 , some 512, and 3 of the light maps are the biggest (1024) and the sky is 2048*1024
(I have 3 Isle's in 1 age.)
when I use smaller lightmaps, then i get really ugly artifacts.
The age is to big to make the sky with 1024*512
May be I cut this one in half and mirror it, then 1024*1024 will do.
Next project will be smaller.

[Lontahv]

I'm always guilty of using many large textures (1024*1024) and up until very recently I exported my ages on a machine with 512 MB of RAM. I doubt it's the textures.

I'd guess that it's the mesh since that part of PyPRP is very inefficient (not that it can really be optimized). If you have a very large object, an object so large that it'd cause this kind of issue, usually it tells you. Take a look at if you have more than one scene in Blender and delete the ones you're not using. New scenes are created every time you import a blend file. I often have zombie objects in my age and find there's a scene I didn't realize existed.