Quote Originally Posted by micpool@mac.com
if you had a loop of 20 300k model poses it would take up 6Mb or so , not that huge.

I thought live was the whole point. Most of my work is prerendered,
3d models have to be stored on the graphics card - which is a very limited resource compared to the hard disc. around 100MB ( on older macs ) compared to GBytes on the hard disc.

it takes more memory than you think to store models, and you can easily overload graphics memory. -

there are also serious realtime performance limits with having large models- graphics architecture related.

almost everything in 3d is much harder than it looks.
for years artists and programmers in games have struggled with very limited resources-
games might look really cute and fast - but they have been very highly optimised - with simple geometry - texture maps and things like bump maps to make it look like it has more detail than it has.
in the realtime 3d world - geometry is often very simple. the textures make it look more complex.
also you might be shocked to discover realtime games rendering is a horrible hack. almost everything is faked up and heavily optimised for specific situation...those games with nice things like soft shadows - are a horrible hack...often pre-rendered - or simplified.

offline rendering - with things like radiosity and raytracing and nice shadows - making 3d models look real - is an entirely different art - to realtime - and takes a very long time to process frames. thousands of times slower than realtime.

do not get these two confused.
you cannot do any kindof realistic rendering with realtime rendering.
thats why its better to do it as a movie...