GeordieJames

Ola Tomas The file's successfully uploaded now - hope you can advise me :-) Cheers James

Ola Tomas I think my computer may have timed out during upload to the ftp - unless there is some clever compression going on where the uploaded file is half the size of the original. Could you check it and if its not worked I'll upload it from home tonight. Cheers James

No update as far as I know. I'm running Mac OS X 10.4.11 (8S2167) on a 2x2.66 GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon, with 9GB of Ram Not seen the same issue in any other programme. I have seen the spinning wheel with area lights before, way back in Beta when I used to try to duplicate multiple area lights. I'll collect and forward for you to look at. It may take some time to upload as the archive is 241.7 meg Cheers James just started to upload, this may take a while so I'm leaving for the day - hopefully it will be there at some point.... It will be in the UserFTP/BugFolder/AnimatorBugFolder Title 'GeordieJames_SpinningWheel.zip' This contains a readme file that identifies how to recreate the error Thanks again James

I will Tomas, thanks. Just as an update, I just opened the file, switched off all the geometry, set the radial light to area, got it into position, then tried to switch the geometry back on and it started spinning. I'd saved the file just before trying to switch on the geometry so I opened it and now it won't open - blank project windows and the spinning wheel. Could this sort of thing be caused by bad RAM ?? Is there a way of checking RAM and whether its good or bad ? Cheers James

Hi all I'm working on an architectural project which to all intent and purposes is quite small (about 31MB EI file). I've been setting things up quite happily but I've run into a problem. I added a light into the scene and when I change it from the default radial to area I get the spinning wheel of death ! I've reopened the file a couple of times and in the last attempt I switched off most of the objects in the file. Added the light in, changed it to area and hey presto it worked. I then went to switch on just the glass objects in the file so I could line the area light up and again...the spinning wheel of death. Is there any potential things I could look at to fix this ? One thing I must say, and it always causes me to scratch my head is the scale of the file is set so 1 granger unit = 1 millimetre. In my head this is 1:1 but should I even be trying that ? I know Ian and many others use 1 granger unit = 1 cm. Does this for example have an adverse effect on photon calculations ? Will it have to generate more to cover the same area ? I should say that the only reason I now work to 1GU to 1MM is because at last upgrade of FormZ it switched to exporting FACT at whether setting you have (and yes I'm too idle to keep changing it). Could my problems be just that ? I hope not as I spent a long time scaling a legacy project to this new setting and I'd hate to have to do it again. Yours frustrated James

9 hours to 40 minutes :-) Shows you how a Brazilian massage can work wonders !

it would be useful so count me in for support of this being a feature James

of course having a fac file in there that had its hierarchy and 4260 individual bricks didn't help :rolleyes: Its just knocked 80meg off the EI file size !!! the danger of using other people's models without scrutiny !

Thanks guys, Checking activity monitor it just crashed out whilst saying it was using 1.24 GB of real memory, virtual memory was up near 4 GB - any relationship between the two, I've not understood virtual memory since you could switch it on/off back in system 9 (I think) Will EIAS9 be able to use more RAM - is that a possibility ? It would be a lot of work for me to split the file up into sensible pieces. For example its all exterior at the moment, no interiors so that simple split I can't do. The only other way for me to reduce size is to use proxy models in the distance but I can't get my head round that for the time being (what I mean is I haven't the time to build or simplify all the models then work out a system for swapping them in and out) I need to investigate the file in greater detail, at some point it jumped from 150 meg to over 300 meg - I suspect I have added in a massively overcomplicated model somewhere OR something perhaps got corrupted along the way making it jump. I shall persevere (British stiff upper lip) Cheers James

Just watched this - fantastic, you've caught the spirit spot on in my opinion. Good luck James

Hello Tomas, Igors and team I've managed to get myself into a position of having a 310 MB project file. This is a little temperamental on my Intel Dual Core, in which I have an NVidia GeForce 7300 GT (standard in the machine) and 9 GB of Ram. The file quits out unexpectedly now and again and I think its to do with display memory. It is a big architectural scene so I have my camera window set to phong so I can 'see' properly but when I open up the top view for example it will crash. Are there any settings in the preferences that I can adjust to improve the reliability of this or is it more a case of getting a better graphics card ? Thank you James

Tomas, Igors, Team I've been away for a week or so but I wanted to say how pleased I was to receive the newsletter - you're proving the software is in the right hands ! Great stuff ! James

Thank you Igors, your explanation is appreciated and I can see its not a simple thing to implement. James

just me then.... fair enough, I just need a faster machine :-) James

Hello Team EIAS3D You may think this request is a retrograde step but its one that I wanted to flag up. Back in EI something or other (a while ago now) you could set up Phong Buffer shadow lights and click 'calculate once'. When you then rendered an animation through Renderama it would calculate that shadow for the first frame and then re-use the data for subsequent frames. Useless for scenes with moving objects but for architectural flybys it was very useful as you could crank up the definition of the shadowing but only get the render time hit once. At some point this feature was broken. In the current set up if you set a buffer shadow and calculate once, renderama does not re-use the same file, rather calculates the buffer for each frame - thus slowing things down. I have a large project that is too big (7.1 million polys) to use GI lighting on as it is cripplingly slow to render. So I am using an illuminator dome to mimic the effect. I want to set this to buffer shadows so it is a soft light/shadow rather than hard edged raytrace but to set one frame to render takes EI 6 minutes (on a Dual Core Intel 2.66), it then renders quickly. If I were to set an animation of 100 frames the setup would take 600 minutes - which is not workable. Setting the illuminator to raytrace enables the frame to be set quickly but to get a soft edge I have the render hit at the other end. Can anything be done about this ? James ps. I think the calculate once feature was broken when Renderama started sending renamed model and texture files, as oppose to the old days where it would use the same named files as used in creation.

It must be that time of year again...Cristobal's work has always inspired me to do better - I must have needed a kick up the backside. Thanks for posting the link Richard, I'll be showing this to my 10 year old as its a beautiful visual explanation of the intricacies of maths evident in our natural world. Cheers James Now, back to my daily grind...

hippy burpday Tomas

I'd like to second that David, its alive ! (said in a Hammer Horror kind of way) James

I'd second the idea of saving a note of the lighting + global settings for materials. I try to save mine out with a name that reminds me how they're set but more often than not time is against me and I forget to do it. James

Consider me slapped ! Brilliant, thank you Ian - that's bugged me for so long but I've never sought an answer. James

Hi all, I've made a real mess of a file I have. Its a project that has been in development since EI2.9 so its been updated to newer versions over the years, lots of things added, taken away etc. The most recent update saw me merge the old file into a new one and I'm currently running through objects re-setting their materials as I've lost the links. But the most annoying thing is when i select an object in the project list the link that highlights in the view ports is quite a distance from the actual object. I thought this was the offset value but that is the offset from the parent effector. What I want to do is to zero the objects and their links without moving them in the world space - is this possible. My only previous method of doing this is to go into the link window for the object and manually move the cross hair till it sits on the object. But I have several thousand objects this has happened to and I might expire before I finish !!! Any tips or slaps around the head for being a stupid boy would be appreciated :-) James

Mmm, thought as much - given it writes to a QT.temp file as it goes along. Hence my need to get Jens' QTVR Object script working in v8 - appreciate Xpressionist is not officially in v8 but should there be a problem. The file I downloaded from the EITechnologyGroup site just crashes out no matter how I try to load it. James

Not sure if its a bug or my file but when I set a camera up as an Object VR, thus having to set the output to QT, my slave camera crashes with no message just an error. Is this a known problem and if so is there a workaround ? James

Hi all A while back (V6.something) Jens created a very handy XP script for creating a QTVR object movie. I've tried to get this into V8 but I either get a dialogue saying the file I have open cannot be found, or it just quits out completely. Is there a way of getting hold of the script itself to cut and paste into XP directly in V8 and will this work ?? James

FormZ - upgraded to 6.6 recently James