[Bf-funboard] Limits on size

[Konrad Haenel]

Sounds like the classic "from earth to ant"-problem to me. For scenes 
with extreme zooms like "from kilometers to millimeters" as you describe 
it the use of one gigantic scene is probably the wrong approach. I had 
to do two such animations in the last months (one zooming from a waver 
to a microchip and one zooming from a 7cm casing to, well, a biological 
microchip). In both cases I created two scenes and used compositing to 
add them together seamlessly, which AFAIK is the method of choice for 
this kind of task.

Another thought on the way: Even if you succeeded in creating the 
gigantic scenes you'd run into real trouble when it comes to animation. 
The IPO-curves for camera movement become mostly unusable when moving 
from gigantic to minimal proportions, I've had my experiences.

If you really want to do something cool write a python script to blend 
camera motion in different scenes an scales, that would come in handy in 
countless situations.

Greets,

Konrad

Vania Smrkovski wrote:

>I have a need to have Blender's internal limits expanded.  My projects have 
>scaling needs which range greatly from macro to micro levels, and simply 
>creating a Mesh at one scale and scaling the Object up or down is 
>impractical.
>
>In particular, the upper limits I am encountering are -1000 to 1000 when using 
>the properties panels, even though I can drag any object beyond that limit, 
>and 5000 as a maximum clipping range for the camera object.  
>
>And if I view my scene without benefit of a camera, I also find much of my 
>scene is clipped.  I can only view a portion of my scene at a time.
>
>Now, the first thing I hear from other Blender users is to try using smaller 
>scales, but I have need to use very small ranges as well, from kilometers to 
>millimeters, and if I limit my upper range too much, I lose the ability to 
>work at the very small range.
>
>I am working on Python scripts to help me manage the Object scaling, so I can 
>have an Mesh for small objects designed at larger scales, and then the 
>Objects for those meshes set to a smaller scale, but this is very 
>impractical.
>
>Also, the naming for Meshes and Objects appears to be limited to 19 
>characters.  
>
>Can future version of the software at the very least provide a way to 
>configure user-defined limits to beyond these ranges?
>  
>