Rakela Raul wrote:whats the file size ?? ...
The Fenchurch project file was 8.8 MB, but considering that a single line of GDL (like SPHERE with RESOL 500) can generate a buzillion triangles, file sizes can be deceptive in a project like this. The object library weighed in at 96.3 MB, which doesn't seem bad when compared to the ArchiCAD library at 200 MB, but the Fenchurch model used every friggin' object in it's library.
A better indication of the model's complexity would be the triangle count in Artlantis, which came out to a total of 8,657,363 triangles. Not too long into the design development it became impossible to load the full model into ArchiCad's 3d window, but careful layer management made it fairly simple to load just what I needed to do the work at hand.
Likewise, in Artlantis I never had to load the full model for any of the renders. Individual layers were exported from ArchiCAD and then loaded one at a time into Artlantis as needed for each view. With the PC memory ceiling of 3.25 usable GBs, the most triangles I ever could get to fly in Artlantis was around 3 million, but this was mainly because of the real elephant in the room: the large bitmap textures which were draining away huge amounts of memory in both ArchiCAD and Artlantis.
The full texture map library contained around 600 images for a total of about 380 MB. Most of the bitmaps had to be large, partly in order to mask obvious repetition, but primarily to accommodate the fine detail required in nearby surfaces in the VR panoramas. In the end I created three identical texture map folders with small, medium and high files sizes for low, medium and high resolutions. In ArchiCAD I always used the low resolution folder, but each VR view in Artlantis had a special dedicated texture library which used the high and medium resolution bitmaps for detailed surfaces close to the viewer.
