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The polycap of Viewer
July 17, 2010 - 8:00am
- 917 reads
I used xNormal recently because Pixologic wiped Zmapper out in Zbrush 3.5. However, if I use the Viewer provided by xNormal 3.17.2.3571 [x86], I can't import a OBJ file that exceed 2.2 million polygons, and the latest sucess import is a 820,000 poly OBJ. It poped up a error message said "Can't generate the adjacency for the highpoly D3DX mesh Default". I want to know the poly cap of Viewer because of this issue.
I 'm a 3dsmax user but I know it is impossible to import a 2.2 million poly OBJ in 3dsMax without hanging. But now xNormal can't either.
My computer is a Intel Core2
, 1.18Ghz, with 2GB RAM, and a Nvidia GeForce 8600GT, running Windows XP SP2.
Xnormal is quite useful. Nomral map calculation is fast and the seam it produced is less obvious than Zmapper, but I still prefer Zmapper since it can handle a 6 million poly mesh easily and without the need to cage it.
I thought the map size of the baked map is irrelevant of Viewer! Maybe because I selected a 1024 size map instead of 512 I used before.
Thank you for your advice, I will give it a try. 
No problem 
A 1024 map is 4x the size of a 512 so the memory rise would be much larger and maybe the combination of a high density mesh and the new larger texture is causing you problems.
Good luck!
Some advices:
1. If you get that D3DX adjacency error under DX9 just change to OpenGL or DX10 ( xNormal->plugin manager->default graphics driver ).
2. WinxP ( specially the x86 one ) is very obsolete. It does not support more than 2Gb of memory(3Gb with a really bad hack) and neither can virtualise the VRAM for DX9 ( which means you can't use more VRAM than your card has, once you subtract the framebuffer/Z buffer ). You really should consider to migrate to a modern OS like Vista or 7 ( x64, of course ).
3. Always triangulate your meshes in your modelling app(like 3dsmax/maya), then export in SBM format. That will save some memory for xNormal.
4. Export the mesh from ZBRush having the "MergeUV" option enabled if you can. that will reduce the number of vertices and, thus, the memory used ( but it will take more time to export ).
5. As meta said, a 1024x1024 map consumes 4x times the memory of a 512x512 map ( not 2x! ). If you enable AA then you also must multiply the memory used by the AA squared.
Soooooo..... A 1024 x 1024 x 4AA will use 16 times more memory than a 512 x 512 map.
A 1024 x 1024 x 4AA map will use = 1024*1024*(4^2)*sizeof(float4) = 256Mb
A 512 x 512 x 1AA map will use = 512*512*(1^2)*sizeof(float4) = 4Mb
6. Notice what counts is the FREE available memory, not the installed one. An unoptimized computer with a lot of programs running at start ( antivirus, Office, Media Player, Quicktime, MSN, Growl, JRE, etc... ) might probably have very few free memory available.
Thanks A LOT! By choosing the OpenGL driver I can now see a 2.8 millions tri-faced OBJ file back in Viewer. Yeah, I can now back to play with Zbrush once more.
But does this affect my normal map baking? I haven't tried a OpenGL driver for baking maps before. Just curious.
But does this affect my normal map baking? I haven't tried a OpenGL driver for baking maps before. Just curious.
Nope, it only affects the 3d viewer.
Thanks a lot Joshy and Metal Andy for your help. changing open GL is working wonders. it's a news to me that AO and Normal Map Sizes would affect the 3d viewer. I just kept minimum sizes as 512*512 and adjusted the cage . then i switched back the texture sizes into 2048*2048. it rendered without any problem.
Its probably down to the RAM limitations of 32bit.
AFAIK a 32bit application can only use 2GB of RAM per application and you might be hitting that limitation.
I think i remember Jogshy saying that memory consumption is reduced in xNormal if the meshes used are triangulated before import.
Also the map size would cause an impact in regards to memory consumption, so reducing the size could help.
The definite fix would be to move to a 64bit OS and get more RAM
Hope that helps!
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