Problem with Plants
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Hello everyone, I am new am new to this forum, and need some serious help.
I have a drawing all I have left to do is add plants.
I have about half the plants added, but now my computer is freezing up in me to the
point where I can't work on the drawing. I have selected "use hardware acceleration" "use fast feedback" and it didnt help. Any other suggestions? My computer is not that old, and the drawing is not huge. -
SU tends to freeze up a lot when you start adding stuff with lots of polygons (like plants), this is largely regardless of your hardware.
The easiest wya to get around this is to only have as little of the model visible at any one time as is possible. The best way to do this is by moving things on to layers and then turning og the layers visibility.
To do this youll first need to vreate a new layer for all the stuff you want to make temporarily invisible. To do this go window->layers and then clcik the little plus symbol in the top left.
Next you'll want to select all the geometry you want to hide (by moving to the other layer), once selected, right click the geometry and hit 'entity info' in here youll see a little drop down menu which tells you what layer al the geometry is on, change it to the new layer you made.
All you have to do now is go to the layers manager again (window->layers) and un tick the box in the visible column.
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So your basically saying turn everything off, and only work with the portion of the plan
where I am putting the plants. I have basically done that, except for a few of the hardescape. It can barely even turn the plants layer on by itself, takes like 2 min. Is this a problem with SU, b/c I am studying to be an L.A. and I will have lots of plants in all of my drawings, should I be learning a different softwar do you think? -
@rudbeckia said:
My computer is not that old, and the drawing is not huge.
But the plants may be huge if they are 3D. It all boils down to that. My recommendations:
- do not use 3D plants except, if you can't help it, in places where their 3D-ness is needed, that is in the regions between the camera and the main subject. From far away, their 3D-ness is wasted, and most of them show their inherent clumsiness when viewed from near.
- use 2D face-me plants or 2 1/2D plants (search the Components forum for Tomsdesk, for instance, or buy from FormFonts) These get their power from transparent images instead of resource-hungry geometry. Alan Fraser once made a landscape with hundreds of trees that is perfectly workable, even with shadows on.
Anssi
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Okay thank you, most of the plants I put in our 3d. I am new to SU, can you view the space from many angles if you use 2d things, or are you limited?
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2d plants are always made as 'face me' components, which means they auto rotate to face the camera, this means you can view then from any angle.
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Okay thanks a bunch for the info, last question: is there a way to make the 3d plants I already have in the drawing into 2d ones, flatten them maybe (sorry new to SU) so I dont
have to re-do all of the plants I already have in the drawing? -
This is an untried idea, but i suppose theres nothing from stopping you exporting a picture of the plant model with a white background. You could then use an image editor to remove the white background and then save the pic as a PNG with a transparent background.
if your feeling keen, you could then draw around the pic of the plant in SU to get a rough cut out of what it should look like, it will then also cast the proper shadows.
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lol....I think frustrated would be word to describe my state right now. That sounds like it might take longer, I just want to finish. I thought dropping the plants in would
be the easy part! and drawing all the hardscape stuff the hard part. I don't even know
if I can open the plant layer and have it function long enough for me to take out the
3d plants. Thanks for the help. -
If you can find some suitable 2d replacement plants, you should be able to place a plant, select it and go in to the components manager (window->components) and right click on one of the 3d components and select 'replace with seleceted', this would make dealing with the vast amounts of geometry a bit more feasible as you wouldnt have to make it visible.
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