Hi. I've been working on this new castle for the Poser freebies section. It has a working portcullis and doors, but I think I may have overdone it. I now have a castle that exports from Cinema as an obj file of approx 9.3mb but just won't import into either Bryce, Vue, or Poser 4. It will import into Poser 5, but has to be scaled to 10,000 to fit other figures. For example, the main entrance door is supposed to be 12 feet high for mounted knights.

Anyway, Poser 5 groans under the enormous strain of this models' size, so I just don't know what to do with it. I can say that Cinema handles it like a breeze, and it renders with all the render light options very quickly, with no RAM problems.

Would it be of any use just posting the castle as an object file, and hoping that a better machine than my 1.7 - 500mb computer can handle it?...or should I forget it and work on something else?

I attach two pictures, one of the castle, and one of the very detailed courtyard.

Can't you try the lower polygons function in Cinema. It will reduce some of the resolution, but if your textures are good enough it may work. I don't know Cinema that well, I got version 6 as a freebie on a magazine and I think I opened it twice, but there is a function from one of the drop down menu's that lowers the polygon count. I think?

PS. When I make large structures, I make an "empty" outer shell, and then make seperate interiors. So to make this work, you could make an outer shell, with no details on the inside, and then seperate figures, and depending on what scene the person wants to make, he can just load that part of the castle. If you make the castle and the interiors you can actually make them "smart prop" to the correct location when the person loads them. I am busy making a sci-fi city, and the main veiw is large, but "hollow", with a low polygon count. The interior of each building is a seprate file, and can be loaded only when needed. That way the poly count is kept down without losing any detail.

Thank you for your help. Actually, the main castle buildings don't have interiors, it is a hollow shell. The detail is on the outside. As for polygon reduction, yes, I do use Cinema version 6, and there are polygon 'optimizing' features available, but they do very little for my model, and in many areas actually do a great deal of damage. In fact a lot of my model is composed of 'instance' duplications, which are supposed to reduce the number of polygons. But after all that effort, I'm still left with 31,722 polygons, and a total of 2,001 objects. Funny thing is that my first castle model had half these quantities and made it into all 3D software with ease. Just can't understand why this building is so different. Maybe I shouldn't have used 'instances', as I've never used them before.

Forgot to mention this...also when I made any round objects, I reduced the number of segments right down to a bare minimum, cutting polygons wherever possible. I should also mention that the base terrain makes up only a tiny percentage of the polygon total. It is the courtyard that accounts for a lot of polygons, yet again, they are mostly 'instance' duplications.

Whoops!!! Correction to post #4 above... My first castle had DOUBLE the polygons and groups of this castle...and was okay with Bryce, Vue, Poser etc.

I'd say divide the models into interconnecting componets, i.e.:the gateway, centeal building and the main tower. Keep at it it looks pretty good!

err: central nor centeal

Well first of all instances won't make any difference, Cinema will convert them to real geometry on converion to .obj 31722 isn't a particularly high count for a Poser model so there MAY be some geometry Poser doesn't like. Is that poly count of the Cinema file or the .obj file? If it's the Cinema file the use of instances will reduce the poly count considerably, the obj file may be MUCH higher. If you haven't already done it I would suggest importing the .obj file to Cinema and check the poly count again. However, since it won't import into Poser, Bryce or Vue there is probably either some bad geometry or a corrupt .obj file. If you can't figure it out you might want to send it to other modellers to see if they can find the problem. - Baz

Thank you Baz. You seem to be right. The poly count for the Cinema file was 31722, but the count from the obj file was 69039, so maybe the conversion has ignored all the instances, somehow that seems logical to me. Bikermouses' idea for splitting up the model is the best idea, but overall, I feel that it is not sensible to have a Poser model that is to a scale of 10,000 so I'm going to leave this model unposted. It really doesn't worry me because I learned such a lot from making it, and it is nice to know that there are limits and that I need to learn more about using Cinema to avoid this happening. My Cinema skills are very limited, so the suggestion of bad geometry doesn't surprise me at all. One thing I have noticed is that Poser hates arched windows and doors, it really screws up the textures. Maybe there should be some rules on what to do, or not to do when making models. I'm still waiting for a reply from Cinema support on that one. Thank you all.

perhaps a conversion to a 3ds file would small it down a little?

Still, converting to smaller componet files might also make a 'bad geometry' easier to find. It's the way I debug C code when and if I write it - when you find out which section the problem is in you can keep subdividing the problem "section" until either the program finds and corrects the geometry (if that is an option) or you do. I don't know anything about Cinema, but in some programs if you use boolean operations a bad operation(either neutral combined with any boolean type or booleans that don't intersect) can be enough to cause problems. - TJ

Maxon (the makers of Cinema) have e mailed me to say that 'incidents' always convert to polygons in an obj file. A fact that I didn't find in the manual. No, actually you are right about bad geometry. I've been relying on very complicated extrusions, made up of many grouped splines to make big walls full of doors and windows. I've now managed to get hold of an edge extrude plug-in which has helped me, it is naturally a slower process, but one achieves nice neatly divided polygons. Up till now I've had long messy spiders webs of poly lines which I've had to knife and stitch together to avoid them crossing window and door openings.