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Sunday, October 28, 2007

EXP3- what happens when you put in too much effort

For my EXP 3 i decided that i would try something different and recreate a structural truss system that would snake its way through Ratan Tata's empire themed office complex... this resulted in a system that included over 1500 members that took an extremely long time to create.

I however, didnt know at the time that by doing so, these additional polygons were going to make it extremely difficult for Unreal editor to rebuild the gemoetry and lighting ... long story short, when it was working, it was taking 15 minutes to rebuild my geometry and i wouldnt even attempt to rebuild both gemoetry and lighting at the same time as i knew it would crash the program... however it came to the point where i couldnt even rebuild geometry as my file had risen to 39mbs.

This meant that i could no longer work on my fiel as it would simply ignore any further improvements to my design. Frustrating as it was, after a visit to see Mr Lowe, he informed me to delete every one of the truss members and recreate them in sketchup... after following these directions and reducing the overall polygon amount from 1678 to 800, it continued to crash... it was at this point i had had enough... i did everything that i could to fix the problem and it wouldnt work... i then had to recreat the spaces in sperate files which are useless to upload as you cannot move from space to space....

i have now had to submit a zip file that includes all my space in seperate files which is shit...because my vision was unable to be reached...

what have i leaernt???

ut counts the number of polygons rather than the size when coming to the rebuilding stage...

my advice... i wouldnt be using the uni computers to create anything more on Ut than simple "gaming environments" as clearly that is what the program is there for...

To create real buildings that include structure and support, the program doesnt handle it, unless such support is coming from blank shear walls that contain no more than a couple of polygons....

perhaps this lesson proved that such a program should only be used to merely create the aesthetical side of the building, rather than explaining how structure works....

sorry to be a bitch, but it would of helped if someone had told me this first.