bobl@pro-graphics.cts.com (Bob Lindabury, SysAdmin) (01/12/91)
In-Reply-To: message from mikep@hpmwtd.HP.COM
I find that the people/person on the support line is less than friendly in
answering your questions. It's like you are an annoyance to them and that
your questions are stupid. If they had produced a DECENT manual, half the
questions they get over the support lines wouldn't even happen. The manual is
very bad in my opinion. Certain specific information is completely missing.
They don't tell you the conventions on what you are doing.
In the tutorial on the Walker.obj animation, they give you the numbers to
enter into the action editor but the do not explain (at all) why the numbers
are what they are or what they are doing! For the tutorial to work, I would
at least expect a line by line explaination for what each number represents
and why it is set at it's value. I guess they think that we can all just
figure it out by cross referencing the numbers with what is written in the
referenece manual. This is VERY time consuming and a real pain in the butt.
It would have been a simple matter to print the info in the tutorial manual.
Another item is the mapping of brushes and textures. They state in the Spring
1990 newsletter that the most calls they get seem to be from people who can't
figure out how to map an iff image to an object. Little wonder with the
skimply explaination they give you on brush mapping! With a little more work
put into the manual, they could probably reduce the time they spend on the
phone with customers that can't figure out things that should have already
been explained in DETAIL in the manuals.
I cringe everytime I have to call them about a problem.
Latest problem I've been having is that when I render an object it sometimes
doesn't render completely in various modes.
Strangely enough, this object will NOT render completely in scanline mode but
WILL render completely in Trace mode.
I called to tell them this and the guy on the phone said, "In the time that
Imagine has been out and with 13,000 copies out there, we have never heard of
this problem" and so forth. They suggested that it could be a low ram problem
or a world size problem.
I am running with 5 megs of ram. I imagine that the problem is a ram problem
as it seems to render polygons up to a point. If I reduce the size of the
final output screen, more polygons are rendered. The object renders fully in
color shade mode and in trace mode. I guess scanline takes up more memory to
render in.
As for world size, nowhere does it tell you how to setup world size that I can
find. I was told that the default world size is 1024x1024 and can be set to
16000x16000. He also told me that it was set in the stage or cycle editors in
the Action script area I believe. For the life of me I couldn't find it.
If you have an object that extends beyond the world size coordinates, that
object will only be rendered to the point that it resides inside of the
coordinates.
Nice fact to know, wouldn't you say?
It also seems that the FP version of the programs eats less ram when rendering
as I can render in FP mode whereas I can't in Integer mode on the same object.
Let's face it, the object I am working on is huge. 610k in size with around
40,000 edges, around 20,000 points and 10,000 faces. So, it's going to take
some memory to render the sucker. However, this doesn't excuse this program
from eating humongous amounts of memory. I use Lightwave and it does many
things that Imagine isn't even capable of just in User-Interface based
matters!
I was told that Imagine opens up 2 screens when rendering. Something about a
black and white screen and then a pallette screen. These two screens eat up
enormous amounts of ram. Each time you render a frame in an animation, the
program must re-load the objects in the scene from disk. This is VERY time
consuming especially with an object which is 610k in size. Load time for each
fram is over 1 minute with a Quantum 19ms drive! Talk about wasting time.
I think that Imagine is a very capable product but I think that it's memory
usage and general object management could be optimized. It just takes too
much memory and too much time to do simple things. A simple wireframe preview
of my project on a 68030 machine for 36 frames would take almost 2 hours to
produce. This is quite a long time to wait for a simple motion test.
I find that although the program supports alot of great features, it falls
short of it's mark on speed and memory management. I will be looking forward
to purchasing Lightwave with the Toaster dongle.
-- Bob
______ Pro-Graphics BBS "It's better than a sharp stick in the eye!" ________
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Raven Enterprises 25 Raven Avenue Piscataway, NJ 08854 mikep@hpmwtd.HP.COM (Mike Powell) (01/14/91)
That's Impulse for you! Oh well, at least some folks like me that complained about what a lousy Silver>Imagine upgrade policy they had, seemed to have waken them up a little bit.... I read that Impulse has decided to extend the upgrade period through Feb. I'm sure that they think that they are bending over backwards for their customers, and doing them a BIG favor. BIG attitude problem at Impulse... If only their people were as good at their product! -Mike-