[Bf-funboard] Limits on size

[Vania Smrkovski]

Oh, sure.  I have been involved in computer programming since the early 80s, and in computer graphics, off and on, for a fair bit of that time.  I am very familiar with binary math and limits both on floating point and integers.  In fact, I do not think it would be a good idea at all to lift limits completely.

It is the tweaking I am asking for, or more specifically, the ability to tweak.

I had considered, in fact, just downloading the software and doing the tweaking myself, but I do not know enough about Linux programming, or the open source methods of programming, to feel safe about making a change and merging my changes with future versions of the code.  So after some thought, and some initialy Python coding, I thought I would ask for the ability to configure the limits by the user.

Here is my assumption:  I presume that the limits chosen improve performance to some degree, although I am not confident with that assumption.  If it is true, though, an XML or .config file might be made available with the current defaults pre-configured, allowing a user to raise the limits, with full documentation warning the user of the performance hits involved and the non-arbitrary limits they face by raising the configuration too high.  

The alternative I am not recommending, as I would imagine it would involved too much code modification, would be to set up a new data structure to handle overflows.  Nasty stuff, and easier handled and more practical to scale objects.  

I mentioned in an earlier email about my own Python program.   I am trying to write a database interface which will allow Blender to work on a project-subproject basis.  One of the features is to allow importing of objects from an external blend file or from the database and automatically scale it up or down.

But as I was experimenting with my protoype for the code at home, I found I still had problems with the -1000 to 1000 limit and the 5000 camera clipping limits.

So really, tweaking those numbers, or allowing user configuration, is the only practical thing I can request....

Thanks for the education, though!  (You don\'t get many open source communities that take the time.)

_____________________
Vania Smrkovski
www.pandorasdream.com


----- Original Message -----
In reply to Vania Smrkovski (vania at pandorasdream.com):

Hi Vania,

The whole reason for the size limits are because of the math involved.
There is a whole field of computer science that deals with the fact that
math on a computer is not the same as your plain old every day math.
pie on the computer is not pie, and there are all kinds of extra things
that just plain don\'t work very well on a computer.

You may do some math operations that are suppose to equal 0 and instead
you get .000000000000000001

The computer imposes limits because it has limits on how big a number can be.

As stated in earlier comments just using the limits that are there you can
get strange results removing the limits will just let you get further into
the range of messed up math, it will not solve your problem.
The numbers may need a review and could probably be tweaked a little but
they are not just abitrary numbers that were picked out of a hat.

Sorry,

Kent

P.S. (I do think it would be nice to have longer names as you mentioned)


> 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?
> -- 
> _______________
> Vania Smrkovski
> www.pandorasdream.com
> _______________________________________________
> Bf-funboard mailing list
> Bf-funboard at projects.blender.org
> http://projects.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-funboard

-- 
mein at cs.umn.edu
http://www.cs.umn.edu/~mein
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