gawd, must we dig this out of the darl hole it crawled in? I get faint of the heart everytime i see it listed and its only someone asking for an update. VEKTOR, we need you!
Sorry, gang, I've been technologically impaired for the last few weeks as my main 3D modeling computer has been down with a very nasty virus infection. About two weeks ago, I finally gave up trying to remove it and decided to reinstall the whole rig, but then I figured it was as good a time as any for my long-planned hardware and OS upgrade. I got the parts last Friday and completed the rebuild just last night. I'm now running an i7 920 Quad Core with 6GB of RAM and Windows 7 Pro 64. Unfortunately, I haven't had a chance to reinstall 3ds Max yet and I'm going to be so busy with work this week that I probably won't be able to do anything with it for several more days. I know I'm long overdue for a Grandeur update and I will do my best to get something posted in the near future.
I'll be very interested to hear your experiences with Win7 running this versus, I'm assuming, XP 64? I chose to stick with XP 64 for the time being, and so far it's working out very nicely for me. Most of the benchmarks I've seen indicate that XP64 is far faster than Win764, which is in turn far faster than Vista64. But I do tend to trust anecdotal evidence from real users more than I trust synthetic benchmarks...
Yeah, I'll definitely want to hear your experiences as well. I'm in the same setup as Cary... everything runs WinXP 64.
I was previously running XP 32 on a 2.5-year-old dual-core system with 1/3 the RAM so I expect a pretty significant performance boost under any circumstances. Most of what I've heard about Win 7 vs. Win Vista vs. Win XP is that performance is very dependent on the amount of RAM you have. Vista has a bad rep for being slow but I've been told that this can be largely overcome with enough RAM. Win 7 is supposed to have less overhead and I've read several reports that Max performs as well or better than on XP, especially the 64-bit version. I've also heard that the version of Max you're using can make a difference. The 2010 version was supposedly optimized for Win 7 whereas earlier versions were not. I am running 2010. Should have more to report by some time tomorrow, hopefully.
Well, I have 64-bit 3ds Max 2010 reinstalled under Win 7 Pro 64 and have been running it through some performance tests. My old comp was basically identical to my one at work and I have been using that as a baseline for comparison. The new rig is rendering the same scenes approximately 50% faster, which ain't too shabby. I'm sure the quad-core CPU vs. the old dual-core is largely responsible for that. Generally, twice as many cores doesn't equate to twice the performance, so at least some of that must be coming from the step up to 64-bit and/or Win 7. Viewport performance is about the same, which stands to reason since I have not yet upgraded the graphics card. I've heard horror stories about very poor viewport performance in Win 7 but that doesn't seem to be true at all in my case, even with the full Aero UI enabled. Biggest problem I've encountered is that Distributed Bucket Rendering, which allows you to network additional computers for added rendering power on a single frame, was not working after the upgrade. My new 64-bit system was refusing to communicate with the older 32-bit systems. I finally traced this to a mismatch between the port numbers Mental Ray uses to communicate with the satellite renderers. Apparently, the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Max default to different port numbers, but a manual change easily fixed the problem. So far so good, and I haven't even optimized my memory settings or overclocked the CPU yet.
At the risk of this being called a Necroposter (I'm actually new to this site and this is one of the best ever fan design ships and deserves bumping), I just thought I might make a suggestion. You have the lower-most torpedo chamber the same size as the one atop the secondary hull. You might want to have the lower "box" chamfered on either side, with a single larger tube--and or a tri-cobalt tube. (AWALT was it?) I wonder if you might recess two slightly modified megaphaser tips side by side in the recess that is currently empty, with SFB drone racks to either side. The rational for such disparate weapon designs would suggest this be a testbed vessel for TACfleet. Lastly, you might want to have a deflector spires or other sensor attachments underneath the fins (below the nacelle supports), with perhaps a red glow in the vents underneath the nacelles to suggest a new type of hybrid warp-impulse drive similar to what we see on the tips of the old Vulcan shuttle/dockport craft from STTMP.
Okay, I don't know if this technically qualifies as an update but at least it's something new. I have, in a manner of speaking, gone back to the drawing board to work out some of the detailing in 2D before investing the time and effort in 3D. The attached sketch is a work-in-progress and will continue to evolve over the next while as time allows. Click to enlarge:
Vektor may in fact be some sort of gestalt consciousness. I know this from my researches and sciences.
So, my son was born two days after the last post in this thread... Now he's four months old. Any updates within my son's so-far-short lifetime?
Work has been progressing on the Grandeur slowly but surely. I am actually trying to complete some detailing and get some new WIP images posted by tonight but I'm up against a major time crunch because I have to go out of town tomorrow morning and won't be back until the weekend. Stay tuned.
Well, it's been a very long time coming, but finally... UPDATE! This isn't as huge and dramatic as I had planned for my big comeback to this project, but I wanted to get something posted before I have to roll out of town on business for the rest of the week. I should have more by some time this weekend.
Mmmmmmm, thruster quads! And that almost looks like a door at the front of deck 2? Are those going to be additional shuttle bays on the upper hull?