Atomic Systems

One of my locomotives crashes to desktop when using the #4 view for a close-up drive by view.

This crash only occurs during a very close drive by view if the camera is placed directly inline with either top edge of the loco body. As the loco passes below and the camera view rotates to look straight down the decking on either side of the loco body starts flashing between visible/invisible then the crash to desktop occurs. This crash can be replicated 100% of the time.

Removing the decking from the model did not resolve the crashing.

It never occurs with the computer selected #4 settings or when the camera is moved to any other position, even extreme close-up (except for the situation described above) which is why it has gone undetected for 2 years. This was brought to my attention by another modeller who can replicate the crash on two other computers.

I have run shapefixer but it has not reported any issues with the model and therefore has not created a new shape file.

As I have all my backups for this loco I have traced it back to when major work was done to the handrails on the model. If I remove a number of (50 odd) polygons from the handrail shape the crashing stops. I suspected that having 2780 polygons in the handrail shape could be the cause so I split the handrail into 2 separate shapes of 1300 polygons each but problem persists.

Rebuilding the hand rail parts (that when deleted resolved the problem) does not stop the crash to desktop.

I have checked the handrails for surplus faces and/or vertices and could not find any.

I have not tried attaching the handrails as freightanim as I am using those tags for driver and screen dust cover shapes. Total face count for the entire model is <10,000.

Can anyone offer any insights, suggestions, sympathy?

Have you tried lowering the values in shape fixer, ie max face/primitives and max poly count say maybe to 2500 faces and 10000 polys. Im not sure if that will work but worth a try.

Peter

Try running the shape through polymaster and splitting it into 2 or 3 subobjects(if you search this forum, there is a thread on how) then run the shape through shapefixer.

The default values in shape fixer are approximate.

The polys per primitive shouldn't make much difference, but changing the polys per object to about 1000 below your total might.

The polys per object crash (usually close up 4 view) depends on how "smoothed" the objects are. If you have more squared edges, the count will be lower.

The polys per primitive usually causes a crash on loading the model.

Gentlemen,

Thank you. I lowered the values for both primitive/object in shapefix.exe and this has resolved the problem for me.

As all my primitives had less than 2800 polygons and all objects were below 11000 polygons I did not alter these values previously. I had experimented with all the other values but it had never occurred to me to change the primitive/object values in the shape fixer program due to my interpretation of the two terms.

Am I correct in assuming that in ShapeFix.exe that the term ‘primitives’ refers to a models components like main, bogie1, wheels1, body etc. If that is the case, am I also correct in assuming that the term ‘object’ refers to the model itself which is a collection of ‘primitives’ that are linked to a parent ‘primitive’.

Once again thanks.