craft crawler tracks vs VUE7 terain

[firetaw]

what is the poly count limit of a scene that the craft plug-in can handle.

we create our enviroments using vue7 and if we make the terain too high poly and use it with craft. the next time we try opening that file will result in a fatal error and we would not be able to open the file ever. [this only happends with craft crawler tracks after being animated and saved] we assumed we would get better collision with higher polygone terain to drive on, but it appenrently has limits.

our scene goes beyond 200k polygones. would this question already been answered before?

we hit above 2 billion polygones during rendering process with vue7 before we created a big forest. with lots of pine trees.

[Carl Buhre]

I've never heard of this Firetaw, but it sounds like a memory issue. How many polygons is the ground object that you're drive on?

And you say the crash only happens when you try to load the scene, not during record?

[firetaw]

correct. after driving around on the vue terrain [which is 100k polygones] and then save the file [Leo_craft_final_simulated.max] that max file would be imposible to reopen again. i would only simulated around 300 frames also. max would load for a phew minutes but it would be freazed as its being opened. then a phew seconds later max would get a fatal error. and would be forced to close. if i do not simulate the crawler tracks and only drive around then i would be fine to save and reopen the file.

if we use a lower polygone terain made in max then we do not get a problem.

il be out this morning but i should be back this afternoon if you guys would like me to send the files [before and after files basicly]

[Luigi Tramontana]

I have had memory issues, but that is with two fully rigged tanks (meaning probably a couple of hundred simultaneously animated objecs). Then it crashed on opening after first trying to load for 15 minutes. The solution is that this scene is most probably larger than your available ram and then it starts eating virtual memory from disk which is painfully slow. If you use a 32 bit system there is nothing you can do, since windows leaves no more than about a gig to 3ds max (at least if you use vista), so the scene must be smaller than 1GB. If you switch to 64 bit and use at least 8GB of ram your problems should vanish forever.

[Enigma229]

Hello, I recently did a mini tank animation using Vue 7 xStream and 3dsMax 2009 and got pretty good results. By exporting a low mesh version of the Vue terrain into Max I was able to use the Craft tools to animate the tank with good performance. I then hid the low mesh terrain, brought in the Vue scene and rendered everything out.

Here is a my animation:

http://www.bbedwell.org/wip/ketten.html

[Carl Buhre]

Hello, I recently did a mini tank animation using Vue 7 xStream and 3dsMax 2009 and got pretty good results. By exporting a low mesh version of the Vue terrain into Max I was able to use the Craft tools to animate the tank with good performance. I then hid the low mesh terrain, brought in the Vue scene and rendered everything out.

Here is a my animation:

http://www.bbedwell.org/wip/ketten.html

Using a lower poly "ghost surface" like Enigma229 describes above will also increase performance when recording.

[firetaw]

the machines we have were built for vista 64 bit but for some reason there was extra money given to dell to modify these machine for 32 bit. which i find underly unlogical. why go backwards expecialy for a devellopers PC. thank you guys for the replys. we will be using a lower mesh from vue just for the tank simulation in the future until we finaly beat some sens into our boss to give us 64 bit machines that we are suppose to have.

i have vista 64 bit with 8 gigs of ram at home also it always makes me cry inside when i go to work to XP although we are getting a massif 10 000$ beast of a video card so we will see how that goes with craft.