Thanks Paul

That certainly reduces the file size (to just under 2 mb), but loading times don't seem changed. I took the basic model again, copied and pasted a new LOD model, saved it and then loaded it again. It took 17 minutes to load. I will experiment to see if there is any improvement on the time with all 3 LODs.

Richard Scott

Added a third LOD to the model, compacted and compressed again and saved. Next time I load up, it took 50 minutes to load (copying and pasting the new LOD model took ages as well). Also, sometimes when selecting faces to edit there is a slight delay before it goes 'blue', so I end up clicking the wrong one.

Oh well, its not the end of the world, the modelling is still fun. I'm just drinking rather more coffee than usual, as I wait for it to load!

Cheers

Richard Scott

Can you send me that model? (support@amabilis.com) It would be really helpful. There may be an optimization that I can made that will resolve this.

I've added two new features for 7.1.

o) Enhanced Point and Face Selection Tool

You can now indicate specifically if you want to choose Points, Edges or Faces, by holding down the 1, 2 or 3 buttons when using the Point and Face Selection Tool.


o) More Accurate Rendering

3D Canvas now supports 32 bit and 24 bit depth buffers so overlapping objects render more accurately when in the distance.

I'll be trickling these new features out in 7.0.2 which should be available soon. Hopefully today.

quote:

Originally posted by Amabilis Support:
Hi All,

I have begun work on 3D Canvas 7.1. I'll be using this topic to report my progress.

Version 7.1 will be largely, or entirely, oriented towards train simulators.

I expect version 7.1 to be available sometime in either March or April.

Richard

Will there be support for Trainz Railroad Simulator 2004 and Trainz Railroad Simulator 2006 included as part of the 3D Canvas with out needing extra plugins?

Richard Scott,

The cause was operations applied in animation mode. When operations are applied in animation mode, 3D Canvas has alot of extra work to do since it has to prepare for animating the operations (deforming the objects for example). This works OK when there are one or two animated objects, but there were quite a few in your model. When the model was duplicated, it became much worse.

You're not the first to have done this. It's very easy to do. Maybe I should add a warning. A clue that you have operations applied in animation mode is that animation is REALLY slow.

I'm sending you a fixed version of your model today.

John_SB,

Sorry, I honestly don't know at this point.

Richard

Many thanks for this.

Do you mean I made changes whilst animating? Because I'm normally pretty careful about exiting animation before modelling. And you do get a warning about this. What I did do, was animate the doors 'manually'(because I'm using the BIN patch in MSTS). That is, rather than enter values in properties, I moved the object a bit at a time along the required axis. Would that count as an operation rather than an animation? And I did redo this a number of times to get it right.

Thanks again.

Richard Scott

It seems that either you did some modelling in animation mode, or 3D Canvas has a bug that moved operations to animation mode.

As far as I know there isn't a warning about making changes in animation mode.

As far as the Export for Rail Sim is concerned are you able to answer these couple of questions yet...

1. Translucency... with regard to MSTS for glazing this was set to 2 on outside and 1 for inside(or other way round). Can you tell me what values to use for KRS?

2. Animation. Do all wheels have to be animated on Locos (and attached Rods and links) and if so how many parts of a revolution are required. Do the tender wheels have to be animated for a revolution?

If you can answer these I'd be grateful as I have a coouple of projects approaching this stage.

Thanks again Richard, as always.

If I'm honest, the most likely explanation is that I'm probably not as careful as I think I am! Otherwise other people would be experiencng this.

Cheers

Richard Scott

It's been a long time since there has been an update.

I got side tracked so I haven't had as much time to work on 7.1 as I would have liked to.

I have more or less completed the Kuju Rail Simulator export. Right now I am going through what I am exporting and validating it. I've found lots of problems, but it's getting better.

I'm comparing my export to samples provided by Kuju. I had been misinterpreting their specs, which caused me some grief.

Once I hand check my export, I'll be writing an importer (it's partly written already) to further validate my export. (Note that my importer will not be able to import models from KRS itself or models shared on the web. It will just import what I export. There's a conversion from what I export to the actual game format.)

Once I'm confident on my export I'll ship a sample off to Kuju so they can test it.

After that I'm going to have to do a lot of work on understanding how to make it easy to get a model from 3D Canvas into Kuju Rail Simulator.

I guess that's all for now.

Hi Richard,

It's good to hear that your exporter is "more or less completed".

Has Kuju sent you some alpha version / sample of the future game to test so that you can have a view of the rendering in the game?
What are the supported textures?

I finally have an update.

I've been distracted from the KRS exporter for the last while while I've been working on other projects. But, I am ready now to move onward. I'll be releasing a beta version of the KRS exporter no later than August 31st.

Of course, without the game itself it is pretty much useless. But, that will come eventually.

Today I released a beta of the KRS export. This is the key component of 3D Canvas 7.1. I posted the plug-in in the Kuju Rail Simulator forum.

There are still many more changes before 7.1 goes out the door, but this is a good start.

I had quite a few headaches with the KRS export. It wasn't like any others I had done before. When I posted that it was "more or less" complete on June 11th, I was quite wrong. I had botched a few things.

But, all is well now.

I've started work on an updated Train Simulator Wizard which will export to both MSTS and Kuju Rail Simulator.

While it exports, the wizard will convert the old MSTS materials into the named shaders required by KRS.

I also plan to allow direct entry of shader names for MSTS with the next release; it won't necessary to enter specific material attributes to get the MSTS shader you want.

Hello,

Is 3DC 7.1 going to be multi-threaded to take advantage of multi-core CPUs?

No, sorry it won't take advantage of multiple core cpus.

I'm off track for a bit while I'm waiting for information, so I decided to work on peformance/memory use for a bit.

If you have used 3D Canvas with a NVIDIA chip in Vista, you'll be happy. I managed to get the load time for 3D Canvas with 5 views open down from 85 seconds to 12 seconds on my computer. There are similar improvement with 1 view open. Actually, they both take 12 seconds now on my computer.

This improves things for all users actually. The load time on my ATI machine is now down from 12 seconds to 7 seconds.

The change also improves things generally when using textures.

I also managed to reduce the amount of memory in use when switching from document to document. It doesn't make as much difference when working on a single document.

I've also be tracking down Vista specific (and non-Vista) bugs. I've managed to find a few, and fix a few.

Hopefully I can get back to "work" soon, but in the mean time, I'll be working on minor fixes, and peformance improvements.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Amabilis Support,

Hello Richard,

It's good to hear... good news with big performance improvements.
RailSimulator official development tools are going to be released in a few days. So I hope it will be possible to test 3DC plugin for KRS soon.

Thanks very much for your work to improve load times with NVidia cards. I'm really looking forward to the update.

Wayne