Well I'd been making this wedding cake and for realism, it's decoration was modeled. But at half done it's 66 MegaBytes big! : ( So, I may have to go for textures and bumpmaps as decoration which could be ok but not as nice for close ups and bumpmaps are not always consistantly bumped. So oh well. We'll see. But I'd thought the huge one was coming pretty... it's just much too big. Dave

Looks good enough to eat though....LOL, pretty heavy calories though 66 MB....Sharen

Does the top hinge for the party the night before?

Oh, the possibilities are endless if the decorations are left as uniquely different Texture and Bump maps. Just think of the range of cakes :)

I need to ask why is this so big, is it because the small little details are spheres? We had a problem like this before, but that was when it was still in the modeling fase, after it was transfered over the file reduced in size...what format are you drawing it in originally and is there a way you can change your spheres into something else if they are indeed spheres....Sharen

Yeah, and it'll probably have to be done with bumpmaps too but have you ever noticed how bumps sometimes get inversed if the light is hitting the model another way? So I'm imagining that this round cylinder shape with a bump map will have some decoration look like it's popping out and some like it's dimpled in and then it wouldn't look so good. I'm gonna try it though. Dave

Icing is never perfect. A few off-centered Bumps would just makes it more realistic :)

Are you boolean joining everything, or do all those little spheres (or whatever they are) have back faces as well? I did bead sets for my Mardi Gras pack, and I couldn't boolean some sets because the shapes wouldn't join well, and the poly counts grew to insane proportions. You can boolean the cake layers as well, just split them later. If this is intended for Poser, you can select individual polys for material assignments, it doesn't matter if they're joined.

I actually knew that I'd be asking for trouble if I used full spheres - so I made a sphere first and booleaned the back half off, so each dot is only a half sphere. Since only half need be visible having the full would make it needlessly larger. I was working in Carrara - the raw carrara file size (which doesn't really matter) is 98MB. When I saw that I thought I better export and see what I was looking at and the .obj was, as I said, 66MB. One thing I was thinking could do is maybe reduce the polys on the sphere (or half sphere). Carrara's default sphere is probably more poly heavy than it need be. Here's what my half sphere looks like in wireframe:

I'll try taking my booleaned sphere in the Vertex Modeler and reducing the polys and see if that gets me a better situation. It would necessitate starting over but it's probably worth it. My plan was to have a morph dials that raised the layers and revealed tier columns so you could have this style or tiered which could be quite nice. Certainly if any of you know a trick or two - Sharen? Sam? (is there really a Sam?) I'd love to hear it. Thanks all. Dave

So maybe I'm getting somewhere. The original half sphere polycount (as in the pic in my post above): polys 764 edges 1209 vertices 445 Now, I've reduced (decimated - sounds awful huh?) the polys to: polys 280 edges 436 vertices 156

It's likely that it'll still be big - if I can assume a little more than half less the size since the polys are little more than half less - but that combined with a method I was given perhaps this cake can be a part of the wedding party after all. : ) Dave

That sounds good, real good....can't wait to see if it all works out okay. Sharen

As small as those dots are, you could still reduce the polycount by a lot. With smoothing, no one will ever notice except in closeups. I have an architectural model that looks great at a moderate distance; I was surprised to find out that the spheres actually only had about 20 faces!