Forum Coordinators: Kalypso
Carrara F.A.Q (Last Updated: 2025 Feb 13 6:48 pm)
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x2000, I really hate to chase off a sale, but I think with only 128 meg you will probably be disappointed with Anything Grooves and I would much rather AGr customers be wonderfully pleased with it. There are some things that will work just fine. If you are using our Tile or Brick shaders and AGr's Adaptive Mesh, it will probably be just fine. Very detailed shaders, where Adaptive Mesh doesn't buy you anything, will still require a lot of memory. I personally haven't used it on anything less than an iMac with 192 meg running OS X except when I was testing it's out of memory error handling. If you do decided to go forward with it, there are a few things you can do to make it as painless as possible. 1. If you are changing more than one option, uncheck the Enabled option, make all your changes, recheck the Enabled option. This will keep it from recalculating each time something changes. 2. Use AGr primitives when possible, they are faster and use less memory than AGr the modifier. 3. Keep the U and V sample rates as low as possible. 4. If you can get away with it, leave the smooth angle = 0. 5. If you use AGr the modifier and want to duplicate the object, use the Convert Deformed Object to Mesh function on the Edit menu. This will turn it into a basic mesh that can be duplicated without the modifier recalculating (and using more memory) for each duplicate. Theoretically, as AGr runs out of RAM it will go to your swap file and get slower. Finally when it runs out completely it will notice there is no more memory and put that message in the warnings area. I hope this helps, good luck. Eric Winemiller Digital Carvers Guild Freeware and commercial 3D extensions http://digitalcarversguild.com
Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
Carrara and LightWave
plug-ins
Thanks a lot, Eric, I really appreciate your honesty a great deal. I guess I'll have to really think about what I would want to do with Agr right now, and decide if it would be worth it. But don't worry, I'll be buying a new computer SOMETIME next year, and when I do, I'll definitely be getting AGr, if I haven't already. It looks great! Now, if you could just write some kind of fur plug-in, all would be sunshine and roses in my little world;)
Anything Grooves is an extension for Carrara that adds displacement mapping. It comes with a primitive tool like the old Supermesh from the Ray Dream days that does cone, sphere, cube, plane, and cylinder, just better than Supermesh did. It also comes with a general displacement mapping tool that will work on any object with good UV coordinates. You can check out the product page here
http://www.digitalcarversguild.com/products/agr/agr.htm
a gallery of sample images here
http://www.digitalcarversguild.com/products/agr/galleryframe.htm
and Anything Grooves vs. a bump map here
http://www.digitalcarversguild.com/products/agr/vs.htm just slide your mouse over the bump mapped images to see what it looks like with Anything Grooves.
Let me know if you have any questions.
Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
Freeware and commercial 3D extensions
http://digitalcarversguild.com
Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
Carrara and LightWave
plug-ins
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Hey people, I need a little info here. I'm thinking about buying Anything Grooves, but I'm concerned about the memory thing. They make a pretty big deal about the requirements, and while my 128 megs falls just meets the minimum, I'm worried that I might still have problems. What happens if I'm working with something fairly large that requires more ram? Will it just go more slowly, or will I be crashing left and right? I'm running on a crappy little Celeron with its stupid tiny cache, so when I attempted to upgrade my ram to the max 256 that my computer can theoretically handle, it actually slowed me down and caused poor 'puter to screw up even more than it already does, so I'm kind of stuck with 128. So what's the deal, am I going to be able to get by, or would AG2.1 just be too much for poor 'puter?