Hi All,

3D Canvas 6.6.5.3 is now available for download: Download 3D Canvas 6.6.5.3

I recommend that everyone with NVIDIA based graphics cards download this release.

All plug-ins compiled for 6.6.5.1 or higher should work with this release.

Changes Since 6.6.5.2
---------------------

o) 3D Canvas now recovers properly from standby mode. This also makes 3D Canvas more reliable generally, especially with NVIDIA based graphics cards.

o) Corrected error 13 that was occuring when a backdrop plan was selected.

Richard

Is 6.6.5 compatible with Windows XP 64bit?

I'm getting the dreaded error #32811 which is supposedly fixed by DX9.0c which is installed.
There is no DX8VB.dll though so I suspect I may need to get that loaded.

That's probably it. I guess I WILL have to include it. I'll repackage 6.6.5.3 with the missing DLL and send it out today.

I think 3D Canvas is compatible with Windows XP 64, but I'm not 100% certain.

I've just installed 6.6.5.3 and am having some problems. I'm finding it very sluggish, with poor framerates compared with with 6.5. Loading up a 10,000 poly model makes it so slow as to be virtually unusable. Is this to be expected?
Haven't got a particularly powerful computer (P4 1.6 ghz, 512 ram and a nvidea FX5600 graphics card) but found no slowdowns when using v 6.5.
Also noticed that when using the texture crop tool, that the texture crop screen showed rolling bars of cream colour when trying to crop a part of the texture.
I have tried using the lastest drivers for the graphic card and have seen no improvement.

Kevin

Hi Kev - 6.6 has always been much slower than 6.5

Looks like I have trouble with all DX8 programs on my XP64 system.

kevm,

Unfortunately, 6.6 is slower than 6.5 at rendering. My view was that I should optimize for the speed of operations and allow larger numbers of polygons. The one thing that I do know is that if I speed up the rendering, I'll definitely have to reduce the maximum number of polygons per object. But maybe that's not a big deal. I'll think about it some more.

Paul,

Is your Shape Viewer DirectX 8 still? Can you tell what's causing the problem?

Richard

Hi Paul, Richard,

Thanks for the replies. So it looks like going back to 6.5 seems to be the answer, then. (until I can afford a new computer!).

Cheers,
Kevin

I have been testing 6.6.5.3 under Vista RC2, and it seems to work reasonably well as long as you also make sure you have DX8VB.dll and D3DRM.dll installed, they do not appear to ship with Vista.

However, some options are really slow in this configuration.

Mike.

Maximus_Mike,

Well... that's a relief. I want it to run well under Vista, but the most important thing is that it runs.

Where did you get D3DRM.dll for Vista? Could you just grab it from XP? That didn't work for me in RC1. I can include it in the install if necessary.

I think I'll grab RC2 and see what I can do to improve things. (Edit: Unfortunately RC2 of Vista is not freely available for download, so I'll have to wait to do my testing and optimizing.)

kevm,

I hate to see anyone go back to 6.5. Maybe 6.7 will work better for you. (or maybe sooner)

I did some experimenting tonight on improving the rendering speed of 3DC. Kevm's P4 1.6 Mhz system really should be plenty fast enough for a 10k face model, in my opinion. So, I'm looking for a solution.

It looks like I can change the method 3D Canvas renders and improve the rendering performance considerably.

The cost is that operations on complex objects will be slower. But, not as slow as I thought. The real cost is about 1/10th of a second on a very complex object. For a typical complex object it is likely around 1/50th of a second.

Also, I may have to reduce the maximum complexity of an object to 32k points. There is a restriction on object complexity in DirectX 8.1 for Visual Basic that isn't in DirectX 8.1 for C++ that might cause this (D3DXMESH_32BIT not supported). I have to look into it further.

So, the next update I will attempt to make the renderer faster. But, there are no guarantees.

Excellent news if it can be done, Richard
Thats what I call good customer service!!

Cheers,
Kevin

I used the D3DRM.dll which was in my XP SP2 installation. Version is 5.1.2600.1

I have a dual-boot PC with XP SP2 on C: and Vista RC2 on H: - I just copied the .dll over and registered it with regsvr32.exe

Mike.

Mike,

I think I forgot to register d3drm.dll when I tried Vista. It might have worked with Vista RC1 too. Maybe I'll re-install and try it.

Kevin,

So far what I have been doing has just made things slower. But, it shows promise. I still have a lot of optimizing to do.

I turned out to be quite a bit bigger job than I thought it would be. But, I think it's a good thing and worth the effort.

I've almost finished the changes intended to improve 3D Canvas' rendering speed.

I must admit that I'm quite surprised at the change. 3D Canvas will be very noticably faster at rendering in the next release.

The next release will be 6.6.7 (I'm skipping 6.6.6, for I think obvious reasons ), and should be available by Friday, or perhaps sooner.

quote:

Paul,

Is your Shape Viewer DirectX 8 still? Can you tell what's causing the problem?

I have finally got my new PC working properly, The 7900GT driver 93.71 was useless - couldn't get many things to run properly.
I downloaded 96.xx beta drivers from Guru3D and they worked much better.

The system is AMD 64 x2 5200+, 2Gb of 800Mhz DDR2, 7900Gt (512Mb), Asus crosshair Mb, 2x400Gb Sata RAID1, Windows XP Pro x64

Still no luck with 6.6.5.3 - same 32811 error.
My shape viewer now works (DX8.1) giving up to 2000fps with FSAA! The dx8vb.dll was in windows\sysWOW32 for the 32 bit compatibility mode.

However... 6.5.1.0 works perfectly, no sign of the graphical glitches caused by the newer nVidia drivers.
It takes 5 seconds to load!
Looks like I'll be stuck with that for a little while.

quote:

Originally posted by Paul Gausden:
The system is AMD 64 x2 5200+, 2Gb of 800Mhz DDR2, 7900Gt (512Mb), Asus crosshair Mb, 2x400Gb Sata RAID1, Windows XP Pro x64

Hi Paul,

The problem is due to a lack of reliability of the 64 bit version of the video driver ?
Btw, why did you choose the 64 bit version of XP ?

quote:

Originally posted by Amabilis Support:
I've almost finished the changes intended to improve 3D Canvas' rendering speed.

I must admit that I'm quite surprised at the change. 3D Canvas will be very noticably faster at rendering in the next release.

The next release will be 6.6.7 (I'm skipping 6.6.6, for I think obvious reasons ), and should be available by Friday, or perhaps sooner.

A new version already ! (I am impressed you already managed to improve rendering speed)
Is the right click menu + FSAA faster with ATI cards ?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: DOM107,

quote:

Originally posted by DOM107:
The problem is due to a lack of reliability of the 64 bit version of the video driver ?
Btw, why did you choose the 64 bit version of XP ?

The 64 bit version was actually cheaper!
It will come into it's own as I write more .NET stuff - the 64 bit version of the framework runs faster.

Most reviews I read say there is no real disadvantage of the 64 bit version, but it is better if you can find 64 bit versions of software.

I spoke to soon about the speed improvement. At this point I think rendering is perhaps 20% faster on my test system.

Another localization problem?

I used Chamfer with 6653 and tried to set to 1,5. It was not possible: it was either 1 or 2.

I closed 3DC 6653, opened 3DC 65 and set chamfer successfully to 1,5.

When I came re-opened 6653, the value was 1,5 and could be used in the chamfer operation.