I'm a bit confused how Vue handles high polygon scenes.

Example1: create a terrain, populate it with an ecosystem. Use an insane amount of instances and you end up with millions of polygons. Vue handles it fine, system resources are below 500MB used memory.

Example2: import two posermodels with cloths, you end up with about 800'000 polygons. Vue warns about low system resources and used memory is above 1 Gigabyte.

Are polygons not equal polygons? Why handles it scenes with millions of polygons fine and chokes on scenes with less than 1 million of polygon if these are not created inside Vue?

Am I missing something?

The eco-system just needs to load one copy of the mesh for each object type and then allocate a few bytes per instance to record location, size, orientation. This is very efficient in memory usage. I don't know exactly how much information is stored for each instance, but it's probably under 1kb, so 100,000 instances will take well under 100MB of RAM to store. The Poser models often come with high resolution texture maps, which take a LOT of memory. A single 4000 x 4000 map will weigh in at about 64MB, and Poser scenes with clothed models can have dozens of maps (at varying resolutions). Even if you make the ecosystem out of an imported Poser model, then the large number of instances add very little to the memory footprint compared to the model itself.

Ah.. that explains it, thanks

Yes, thank you. I was wondering about that myself. (But not with poser Models, with some of my old scenes using Vue trees, rocks etc.)

"allocate a few bytes per instance to record location, size, orientation..." It was my understanding that if you used a plant from the Vue plant system, not only did you get a different location, size, and orientation, you got a different (random) plant generated. If this is so, then there would need to be more than just those details maintained for each instance. If it DOESN'T work that way, then there could be some redundancy in ecosystem instances.

"a different (random) plant generated"

Yes, each plant instance is different, but this still doesn't need a lot of storage, it could be as little as storing the random number used to generate the plant, or perhaps a list of sizes and angles. And even if it does store a complete mesh for each one, the textures still don't need to be duplicated and even the highest resolution Vue plants have a lot less polys than many Poser models.

Message edited on: 04/01/2005 09:47

Yeah, perhaps. wink Guess we'll never really know how it's done since it's patented.