StarTrek DS9

[EBOLII]

wooot woooot wooooooo

[tobian]

You running on LW 64 bit? Otherwise you are gonna hit a poly count wall soon

Looking superb! and anyone is always welcome to join for a pint.. like I need an excuse

[Gareth isbannned]

One thing that would mean departing from cannon design but would improve the station would be to add another set of pylons which extend out from the center of the station. It would allow larger ships to dock and deliver people and goods to commercial section of the station more quickly. Adding 3 additional straight corridors from the center of the station would provide 3 new docking ports on the docking ring.

[psycho]

Originally Posted by Gareth Gobulcoque

One thing that would mean departing from cannon design but would improve the station would be to add another set of pylons which extend out from the center of the station. It would allow larger ships to dock and deliver people and goods to commercial section of the station more quickly. Adding 3 additional straight corridors from the center of the station would provide 3 new docking ports on the docking ring.

OMG please! no! the design is great as it is... minor tweaks and improvements are ok, but please don't mess with the overall design!


but maybe you could add nacelles

[gpdesigner]

Lots of good stuff being said . . . thank you all
I'm not going to drop the ball on this one . . promise.

@Tobian, not really sure if you are joking or not, but with v9.0 there should be no polycount wall. I know if I was using Inspire 3D it would have choked already but a poly wall in 9 shouldn't exist.

My machine is a MacPro so by nature it is 64 Bit but LW for Mac has no 64 Bit version. . . yet. So I hope after all is said and done, i should be fine with my poly count. . . . hopefully.
gp

[tobian]

Err sorry GP I am not joking. In a 32 bit mode you are not far from the poly count wall now. Lightwave has no gigapolygon core, or a bucket renderer mode. You can bypass it using plugins like HDinstance (if you needed to cover the station with dozens of instanced trees for example? ) but you are limited by how much memory a given task will take. This is doubly bad for Fprime, because it also has to load it's contents into it's buffer, which takes up more memory, if you are close to the line, then it stops working a while before renderer does!

I am not double sure on how a Mac handles memory in 32 bit applications, if it's 2 or 4 gig - but beyond that that is your whack. Once you run out of memory for polygons, you will not get a render.. try this now with a subD object, and crank up the polygon density settings.. you will get a 'out of memory' warning.

[gpdesigner]

This sounds dodgy to me . . . I will have to check into this . . . . small snag but there is a work around I am sure.
gp

p.s. obviously this poly cap you speak of is only in Layout . . correct?

[tobian]

Just to clarify there is no 'cap' in-so-far as an expiration date on the number of polygons you are allowed: It's a "ran out of memory" issue, because renderer has to hold all of its polygons/surfaces/software/texture maps in memory to do a render, and if you have run out... you have run out. Using a bucket rendering system (like a lot of software does these days) can mitigate this issue, because it only loads in the polygons in a given 'bucket' (subdivided square of the rendering environment) this tactic can fail if you have all your detail contained within one single bucket though LW does not have a bucket rendering solution built in. Yet...

There are a number of workarounds. Don't use Lightwave to render with. Render your object in layers (would be handy if LW had a simple layer rendering system wouldn't it!!!). Manually subdivide your screen into a number of region renders, or use http://www.trueart.pl/?URIType=Direc.../VirtualRender which is quite cool, if a bit expensive!

Running a 64 bit system will help (assuming you are using 64 bit LW) But yes the whole point of having 64 bit LW is not because it's faster, but because it allows you to load ridiculously high poly scenes, so long as you have enough memory installed. By it's nature, LW is actually very efficient at rendering high poly scenes, and can handle a lot without resorting to bucket techniques, but you will hit a wall unless you throw ungodly amounts of ram into your system

LW can render ludicrous poly counts by using volumetric 'cheats' like HDinstance, and the new hair will probably be also able to render a ludicrous number of polygons using the same method, but there's a limit on what you can do with this method. Instancing of sections can help (as I mentioned in previous posts) as if it's re-using the same data from several angles, this is saving memory! But yes, I am not using hyperbole when i say I can't do a full station render, I physically can't!

[gpdesigner]

Ok . . .
Scene:
5,968,534 polys
memory 1324.8m
segment memory at 1200 m

Radiosity @ 3 PLD
Time elapse: 6mins 9 secs

No image maps used . . .
I think I will be safe here . . . noway this is going over 6 million polys . .
I hope . . . .
gp

[tobian]

Haha good good. However remember what I said about image maps... you have none yet..... It all adds up in the memory tally!

and sweet render time.. just wait till you add something other than a white background, to light it, and something other than diffuse surfaces Also.. are all those instances? Or whole seperate objects? Like I said instanced objects can make a difference on memory use!

Sabir.. Erm, I have no idea if I can answer your question till you ask it! PM me if you think I can answer it?!