Large models.

[bigben]

Got a model to check out but I know it's going to cause most of my apps to have a hernia.  4GB OBJ with 3x16K textures.  I know it will load and probably render but is setting the 3D preview to wireframe pushing my luck?. Any other tips for working with large meshes?  I'm running on 32GB RAM and probably won't be able to decimate it.

[Dune]

That's huge, curious how you fare with it. You could try decimating anyway and using a bad, but small object may be good enough for positioning etc. Then replace by biggie.

[Kadri]

Ulco's suggestion is probably one of the best ways.
At working time the scene is very sluggish with some small changes even in the nodes.
If you use the wireframe preview, it is the best to pause it so much you can and only start it when absolutely needed.
If you have finished in your mind how your scene will be rendered, you can try to delete polygons that are facing away from the camera for example. There is mostly no need for polygons of an spaceship on the far other side for example.
that Said , still Terragen handles very big textures and objects very nicely.

I wish i had time to make those kind of changes for my objects in the VR contest before.
I think Oshyan is remembering me much if he had already time to look at the scenes

[bigben]

Except decimating takes a LOT of RAM. I can work with about 65M polygons before I run out.  I'm going to setup an ortho camera and microexporter to create a low poly file for placement.  It takes a while to load and any transformation/setting Z-up takes ages to perform BUT default scene plus this model took 57secs to render    So far RAM usage maxed at 14.5GB

[Matt]

Use the RTP. Very heavy objects might be difficult to draw in wireframe, but the RTP should handle them easily.

Matt

[digitalguru]

try a program called Meshlab:

http://www.meshlab.net/

It's free and can handle large objs easily - and has a very good mesh reduce filter

if your mesh is a micro polygon obj output from Terragen then also run the duplicate vertex filter .

[bigben]

Use the RTP. Very heavy objects might be difficult to draw in wireframe, but the RTP should handle them easily.

Matt

OMG, that is F...reaking awesome!!! 

[bigben]

try a program called Meshlab:

http://www.meshlab.net/

It's free and can handle large objs easily - and has a very good mesh reduce filter

if your mesh is a micro polygon obj output from Terragen then also run the duplicate vertex filter .

Meshlab isn't that great on really large models in my experience.  CloudCompare is much more robust but in the end there is no escaping that decimating requires RAM so there are practical size limits

[digitalguru]

Meshlab isn't that great on really large models in my experience

It is compared to Maya, how much RAM do you have?

Will have a look at CloudCompare though, looks like another example of well featured open source software.

[bigben]

32Gb.  Meshlab and MeshMixer don't really like more than 10M polygons... and with 32Gb RAM I can only decimate up to ~60M polygons. Reality Capture processes in chunks that automatically match your resources so it's easy to end up with huge models.

[digitalguru]

hi BigBen,

Just curious about your 4gb obj - is that an object you are trying to load into Terragen?