I’ve been working with terrain meshes in the 1.5 to 2.0 million range but this one took the cake. I have crashed Blender several times with 3.5 to 4 million faces, but this one is only 5,408 faces away from 3 million and Blender is still stable.
scaling, rotating and moving works smoothly. of course I can’t edit the mesh at all, but its going to be a beautiful render.
Specs:
During creation RAM usage was 1.13 Gb of my 2 Gb.
File size is 120 Mb.
…yikes…
Same Problem, its not blender that crashes, you g-card just cant handle it… i got around 1 milloin before blender died.
Its lfe you overclock you CPU and its being pushed to hard It becomes highly unstable and will freeze /crash applications.
actually, it isn’t the graphics card necescairly
blender can double the memory usage for a mesh on occasion [like when exiting edit mode]
large meshes [million plus polygons] can take several hundred meg, doubling that can somewhat easily extend the memory allocation limits of your os or hardware… [I’m actually not sure]. Blender craps out on my machine if it tries to allocate over a gig, which happens if I try to mess with my largest meshes…
http://mywebpage.netscape.com/YinYangEvilSane/uuberextreeme.jpg
5755200 triangles in two meshes… not exactly editable [a good excuse to use lower poly meshes, there’s no way you can use blender’s tools to detail something that high poly]
i’ve gotten up to over 7 million faces before my RAM usage got so high that my computer couldn’t handle it. it was choppy as heel before that.
this was a whole scene, before mesh’s went above 64K verts
Alltaken
yeah, i have a very beefy Graphics card. definately not that. but at any rate. try doing something like this in Maya or 3DStudio. I successfully crashed Light wave with a mere 800k faces. Maya i know can’t handle much more then 1mil. but blender is a whole nother animal.
cough…
umm what software does the movie industry use?
i think you will find Maya can handle more polys thn you could possibly imagine creating yourself.
Alltaken
you should try using displacement mapping for that sort of thing.
no, displacement mapping doesn’t give the resolution that i need for this project. besides, where would i get an image to create the displacement map?
Only Blender displacement mapping though. Yafray might be better. You make the map in Photoshop. The problem with displacement maps that I found recently is they are greyscale so only give you 256 values. I guess one way round it is to have layered maps or model the scene roughly and use displacement maps for the small surface detail.
You’re right Maya can handle over 1 million polys. I think the Lord of the Rings battle scenes went into the billions. You just need really good hardware. You can probably reduce the memory usage in Blender by turning down the undo steps stored - try putting it to zero and live on the edge.
I can put Blender up to about 500,000 polys and still use it ok. I’d say about 1 million was my limit too. I sort of prefer having slower graphics because it forces me to optimise my scenes and explore more efficient ways of doing things.
well my Moabs City scene had about 2 millions polys and was still very easely editable/workable. I have a 2.4ghz with 1gb of ram. It’s a matter of not having too much poly in a single object. and using your layer option well 
yeah we got the same computers basicly Ecks, but i am more crazy/stupid than you i think 
your cities were all way less mental than mine he he.
Alltaken
haha well wait till I finish this one. You’ll probably think I’m crazier than you are :P…but yea modelling each inside of the appartements of every building…gosh that was stupid 
Once i was working on a scene and i accidentally subdivided too many times. I did some math and the resulting number of verticies was in the billions. Needless to say, my computer locked up. My pagefile went into several gigabytes and blender took a good 15 minutes to be closed by Ctrl-Alt-Del.
I wont make that mistake again.