Hi Mark :
As I said , we love this S/W and so should speak up about
things that are not doing RSV6 any good . I wasn't putting
it down , just pointing out the obvious flaws that some of
the inner circle people seem to love to ignore .
Yes V6 has some cool new stuff , especially for architecture .
Yes , I think most of the code is there for the .OBJ plugin ,
but it's not 100% . It worked for you then , so try it now .
I decided to write a tutorial on .DEM import and rendering .
Brought in one single 3/4 Million faces .DEM and RS choked
so bad I had to keep shutting it down via Task Manager .
I have a Quad core with 4 Gigs of ram , but the amount of
Ram was not the issue at all . RS never consumed more than
20% of the available ram . I just don't think RSV6 is that
optimised for large scenes , even still .
Hey , by all means go 64Bit and 32 Gigs of ram , but don't
be surprised if it only helps a little , and not a lot .
For instance , load the sample scene Samples/scene_template/
island project . It's 10,000 faces and RS handles it OK . It
traces OK with this Quad .
Now , smooth the SDS mesh and it's 40,000 faces . RS goes
very slow now . 40K is nothing nowadays . Turn off displace-
ment rendering and it renders in less than 2 minutes and does
look good , but no joy to work with . 750 MB's of Ram used !
Some S/W is optimised for million polygon scenes , some are
not . That , I can accept . I have a very hard time accepting
that some tools that are years old still do not work right .
cheers
garry
It's best , I think , that we do speak up , and not try to
focus on being a very good boy . It's best for the Realsoft3D
in the long run , in the bigger picture .
Hi Garry & list,
True. I've always liked the software but I had my share of hairpulling too.
I had high hopes of the advertized FBX support, but - correct me if I'm
wrong - it's only basic geometrics, no textures. Is it so much to ask for a
few fully supported formats, including textures and animation? It would
grant RS access to completely new niches of customers.
Of course file exchange should get top priority now. That, and sheer
stability and the ability to handle 'big' projects smoothly, without choking
too early.
The .obj support was a big step, I managed to import Ivy generated .obj
files including UV and textures, but forgot the details... then there is
this obscure 3ds+ plugin that's only hinted at somewhere in the forum. It's
not enough, it's getting stale.
First things first: stability, file exchange, polish the old V4 tools and
their docs (like UVImage).
But despite all that I'm really happy with some of the new V6 tools (good
boy!), especially the Building tool which I've used extensively the past few
months. The Plant tool is really nice too, but extremely resource-hungry.
And I couldn't live without VSL ;)
Next thing to try: running RS on a 64bit Linux quadcore machine with lots of
RAM, I hope that will lead to less freezes/crashes/blank screens than my
current XP box, and will enable me to render old complex plants without much
hassle.
-Mark H
