I have Vue d'Esprit 4.2 on a P4 1.8 ghz with 1 GB RAM and a 128 MB NVIDIA GeForce 4. How many polygons can Vue handle before it keels over dead? Thanks, Tony

Vue can handle as many polygons as the memory (RAM) and the power of your computer can handle:-) You can help your system in hiding objects inside your scene if you don't need to see them absolutely while working, in grouping objects, in creating layers and in hiding layers.... Guitta

How about testing it? Because there are so many individual parameters it is hard to tell. Especially because things depend as well how the polygons are organized. Not only how many. Try terrains and you can handle a lot more than imported trees from XFrog or TreePro. So i think you simply try it out by yourself and let us know. My biggest so far was around 60 million polygons, but it was not my slowest. I heard from others that they even have dealt with much higher counts. Again, not necessarily the slowest files. The slowest i had had only around 1 million polygons and was only an imported conifer from TreePro. I gave up on that.

Agree with Walther on how the polys are organized on the models. I have had some fairly low-poly scenes with imported objects that slowed to a crawl, even with grouping, layering, and hiding layers. And some large-poly scenes that still tripped along just fine. I find it's not only polys that can cause my scenes to start slowing down, but number of materials as well. A lot of my scenes have a huge number of materials in them, and even with a lower and efficient poly count, they can start to stumble a bit. So I save in increments just in case.

Thank you for the tips! The reason I asked, is that at about a million polys, the poly count turned red, and I knew that I had a ton more that needed to go into the scene. I thought that maybe the red counter was some type of warning. So some imports tend to choke it up faster huh? How about Poser imports? Right now, I'm at about 3 million polys, .8 million of which is from a poser import with probably close to 100 textures if all of the material zones count (if not, then maybe only around 20 or so). So far, things seem to be going ok. I'm just worried because at one point, the scene did crash to the desktop (at around 1.4 million polys). Fortunately, I make a habit of doing what Djeser suggested anyways (in fact, I'm even more anal about it that many people, as I save under a different file name about every third save....I've had way too many files become corrupted in other apps during saves, so I'm quite paranoid that way (G;`, ). I'm sorry if these seem like total newbie questions, but when it comes to Vue, that's what I am (only had it now for about a month). When I'm done with this scene, I'll post it here so you guys can take a look! Thanks again! Tony

Tony, the idea of this forum is to discuss things like that. So you dont have to apology about bringing this up here. Poser imports i mostly found very easy going (beside the texture problems that could accure) but Vue handles them very well on my machine. Maybe i will change my mind soon, i have something in mind that needs a lot of Poser figures in it. And different ones. We will see.. I am really looking forward to see the result of your efforts. Walther

The pic I'm working on now has 24 million polys & counting...turned red along time ago. I have 1g of ram & Pentium4, GForce 4600...so far no crashes or slow downs. Most of the polys in my latest are coming from many flowers. The only problem I've ever encountered with slow downs or crashes was too many trees.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=550509&Start=1&Artist=tradivoro&ByArtist=Yes

If you go to the link above, that image has 18 million polygons, mostly with the trees... It took me 2 hours to render 8 1/2 by 11 at 300 dpi in final setting on a 500 mz machine with 256 megs of ram... However, I have other scenes that don't even approach a million poly's and it took me 5 hours to render at much smaller resolutions... So, there really isn't any rhyme or reasons and polygons alone are not what are going to make Vue keel over... :)

You know, I've run into this phenomenon myself.

I've had images that I thought would be "quick 'n easy" to render in Vue.......turn out instead to take hours to render.

On the other hand, I've had images that I expected to take a geologic age to render pop out in a matter of minutes.

So much for the "science" of rendering.......

Latest update at 25m polys Vue crashed..gave me the dreaded ok..scene corrupt. So I will finish adding in poser.

My experience: I've gone as high as 95 million polys on my dual 1 gig. Still could have gone higher I'm sure I just didn't need to. I think also it has to do with the number of objects plus the poly count before you have to think about other rendering options. Djesers right though, read on. My general rule of thumb about these things in any 3d package is to remeber how 3d programs deal with materials, which can be the problem in vue (which doesn't have a poly limitation that I know of like other programs). Procedural materials = Processor cycles Bit Map Materials = Ram. If you are using a bunch of procedural materials that are slowing your renders consider exporting some of them as bit maps and re-applying them to shift over to ram. If you think you're choking on ram use more procedurals. The point is its not just polys you have to concern yourself with. Save all of your scene materials (named properly in the materials editor). Reset all you materials to various default colors to see what I mean (landscape 1 to grey , landscape 2 to green etc..). I may be wrong but I'll bet you'll run into a material or 2 that you may be able to downsize and get your scene a bit more under control. Test your materials for size also. You can get a bunch of arguments about this but if your material is roughly 110% of the approximate size it will be displayed on the screen (you gotta sort of eyeball it in) it should render properly . In other words if you have a bitmap material that is 2048x2048 pxls but will only take up 500x500 on your screen, try sizing it down. They add up fast. Good Luck Bot

The funny thing...I finally rendered my image....604 objects 24+mil polys..rendered in hour or a little less..go figure. I'm with Xeno...I've had scenes much, much smaller and the render was 12 hours :O. An enigma ;)