Posted by Kevin Matthews on October 16, 2001 at 10:31:29:In Reply to: Re: Need advice on trees for animation posted by Andrea Starkey on October 16, 2001 at 07:54:37:
Andrea, I focused before on your direct question about trees. This brings up a couple of other questions.
As far as we know, the only effective limit on the size of a DesignWorkshop model is available RAM. While 30-37MB files certianly put you into the "super-user" category, we do know of people who work sometimes with 100MB DesignWorkshop files.
Don't discount the value of adding even more RAM to your system. Hardware is relatively cheap these days, and with a fast system and tons and tons of RAM, you should also find DW moving faster (which is usually an issue as projects get huge).
Not knowing your system, I'm guessing here, but if your system can take more RAM as it is, that could be your number one quick fix.
Don't know as much about hard limits in Artlantis, but maybe Abvent could give you a technical answer on that, if you find the right way to ask.
One more thing. We have a few software tools for DesignWorkshop we've never distributed, because they seemed too esoteric, weren't originally cross-platform, or had other side-issue limitations.
One of these is a simple utility for working on huge projects, called "Project Builder" (not to be confused with Apple's programming software with the same name, which actually came along years later). Basically it just merges together all the DesignWorkshop files that make up a giant project. The result is that it becomes much easier to work on each house or cluster quickly and nimbly in its own file, and on separate chunks of trees of trees. Then when you need to check or render the whole thing -- or various subsets of the whole thing -- you just run Project Builder to reliably make a giant combined file.
It's a simple thing, but it can save a lot of time and mental focus for copying and pasting together giant project hunks. If you think that would be helpful in your work, let us know. It might take a couple of weeks, but we'd be happy to take you on as a beta tester for Project Builder.
In summary, it looks to me like there are three strategies you can apply here... a) Work the trees smaller, to keep project from getting too giant, b) bulk up your system, to handle giant projects more smoothly, and/or c) apply additional tools to ease the process of working on giant projects in smaller chunks.
Forgive me if I'm belaboring the obvious -- just trying to help.
Keep up the great work!
Best wishes,
Kevin
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