Print at Dec 15, 2025, 11:39:50 PM

Posted by Ceciliabr at Feb 15, 2016, 10:09:55 AM
Re: File and settings for expanding memory - anyone know how?
My report:

The project was teaching my new neighbor SH3D. He has just bought the house next to ours, and he is planning a major make-over. So I showed him how I had modeled my own house for the same reason, and when he offered me a weekend with an unlimited supply of chilled prosecco if I would guide him thru the program and reveal some of my tips and tricks… well, I accepted.
Basically he is a man who doesn't even know how to compose a palette. He is a physician– a gynecologist, and has never done any 3D before. He uses Photoshop to edit his family albums, on a powerful PC with Xeon 8 core and 32G ram – a bit heavier than your standard home computer, and no doubt perfect for SH3D.
We set the memory to 16384M. The program started – as did our first problems.
I had been busy, prepared some files, copied everything to a memory stick, and made shire is was formatted for PC – I had a plan.

But the files from my Mac only produced a message: File damaged, "delete – replace – don't load".
I tried opening them with my 5 yr old old Macbook, and that was no problem, even with only 4G ram and a standard memory configuration.
But there was no way my pre-prepared lessons would open on his PC.

So I decided I might as well to go from scratch – which in the end turned out to be just as well.
I constructed an ugly cabin, placed it in the norwegian mountains, opened a bottle of prosecco and called our week-end seminar "Smoke & Mirrors".


Things I found quite irritating:
In the photo-renderer, for some reason the Create and Close buttons have changed place in the Windows-version, and when you close the renderer, all your settings are lost. Having worked with this program for 2 years, I have developed a set of habits, so of course I closed the renderer all the time, and lost my settings, but of course I didn't know they were lost, so I rendered mostly with standard settings, and was not too happy with the result.

Another thing about Windows:
In the Windows-version, closing your scene shuts the program down completely. Very annoying. Opening two big files at the same time, makes the system extremely slow.

A third thing:
The Windows-version tends to get slower and slower the longer you work. Restarting the machine and re-opening SH3D, everything is back to normal. That never happens with the Mac-version.

Okay,
here are some views I got from my pupil:

"Why do I have to resize my texture-window all the time? Shouldn't the program remember?"

"There should be shortcuts for the align-tool. Saves a lot of time."

"Keep proportions - it should remain in the state I left it. Normally I want it on, since most models are in perfect proportion already when I load them. At least it should be turned on by default."

"And the handles; yours are red and quite easy to see, while mine are dark blue, and almost invisible."

"I really miss constraining re-sizing to only one direction. A modifier, like holding the shift button, could keep the width when adjusting the length, and vice versa. "

" The interface is very bright. I can feel my eyes getting tired. It could be a lot darker, like Photoshop. There's a reason why a lot of time-consuming programs have a darker interface. Don't you get tired? It's even brighter on your machine. "

(Or maybe the prosecco had something to do with getting tired after twelve hours work…?)


But all in all he was very impressed, and even more impressed with the Mac-version.

Well, part from me being a bit frustrated with Windows, I think the "seminar" turned out quite nice in the end.
I'm thinking maybe I should hot-link some of my renderings in the Gallery.