General Application Responsiveness

Sovereign

I've seen some pretty impressive models around here (fractalsponge comes to mind) that have to be millions of polygons and massive files (I think I read something about fractal having a 700MB max file). I am hardly short on storage space (more than 3TB internal).

However, I am wondering how people who work on large, detailed models keep their applications responsive to the touch? For example, whilst dragging some (block-instanced) turbo-laser batteries around in Rhino 3D I end up waiting a few seconds for the click to register, then a few more while the drag registers, etc. A copy-paste of a single item can take five seconds. The task manager shows Rhino4.exe using 25% (one core of four, single-threaded app unfortunately) until whatever I did is completed.

Is my impatience warranted, or is this just the price of working on large, detailed models? The computer supporting these activities is no slouch: Q6600 @ 3.2GHz, 8GB RAM, 9800GX2 w/Windows 7 Ultimate x64.

I know Rhino is a 32-bit application, but even importing the files into x64 3ds max results in slowness (of 3ds max).

Josea

I think that lots of those high poly count models are created in lower polycount modes and then exported in higher counts. For example something created as a low poly cage that controls a higher resolution object. NURBS have no polygon until converted. If a model is made up of lots of NURBS and then converted to polygons, it will have a very high polycount (depending on convertion settings and application).

L2K

when you do animation, you work with proxy models in really low poly, then, once its done, you just replace them with higher detailled models.
and about one by one. you render the differents things separately, then recompose them in your favorite compositing software.

wjaspers

When working on these big meshes, you need to hide the parts that you are not working on, or display them as boxes. If you work on them and the whole mesh is displayed then indeed it will take a long time moving around parts.