Ive got a Hercules Prophet II - Gforce II video card with 64megs of memory that blazes. I can run Deep Explorer, load high polygon models, spin, resize and move them around the screen in real time as if it were nothing.

Heck, I can even do the same thing in Poser, which doesnt even support Open GL.

So

Why cant I do that in Vue? Why is it that even small scenes bog down so much on redraws that Im forced to switch each of the display windows to wire-frame box mode just so I dont have to wait forever for the screen to update?

What is it that every other software company seems to know, but E-On hasnt figured out? The redraws in Vue remind me of the days when I was running Truespace 3 on an old Pentium 1 100mHz.

No, come to think about it, even back then Truespace was faster.

This shouldnt be that difficult. Theres got to be a textbook out there somewhere that tells how to do it.

Sorry for the grouse. Ive been converting a lot of models to VOB format lately, and Im just extremely annoyed right now.

-SMT

It would be cool if we could turn off the redraw thingy entirely while working on assigning materials, for one thing. Vue feels the need to completely redraw between every change made. As a test, I made a sphere in Rhino and polar arrayed it 1,000 times, then exported that mess as a .3ds file with the least number of polygons possible. It weighed in as a 1,000 part mesh, but only had a file size of 547 KB.... Vue's problem with meshes isn't the file size, OR the number of polygons. It's the number of individual parts in a mesh, which really doesn't seem to make sense. And I suspect that while you would think it's supposed to be calculating polygons, it's not. But still, it slows down drastically. What's causing it then? What is Vue seeing that we are not? Something unconventional in the way it "reads" meshes, as opposed to other programs, I would say. And, worse yet, it wants to tell itself that a redraw isn't possible until it has understood that thing that other programs have the sense to ignore, while suspending all further progress until it has sorted it out. yes, a "Disable Redraw Until Needed" feature would be very cool. Well, of course, it'd be better if they do in fact discover this thing that the other software companies already know. ;)

My opinion on the slow redraw problem is that it occurs as a background process (ie. thread). As Mike pointed out, I wouldn't be surprised if more parts-per-object mean more threads-per-object. A computer with dual-proccessors would bear this out by handling additional threads and hence, redrawing quicker.

You can turn off the redraw by right clicking on the the redraw screen area. It comes up with a little menu for redraw options... that should speed things up a bit.