Viewport Adaptive degredation

[Francois Yenny]

Hello,

 

I'm fairly new to 3ds max 5.1 and I have what I guess to be a basic question... Thanks anyway to anyone who can enlighten me.

 

How does Adaptive degradation of the viewport display work. As my scene got larger and more complex, it no longer displays in Shaded mode. When I use F3 to toggle between wireframe and shaded modes, I get a hidden line wireframe.

 

Is this normal?

 

I guess I should mention that I'm running on a Dell 8500 with a Mobile Intel Pentium 4 - M CPU 2.20GHz and 1GB on RAM and an nVidia GeForce4 4200 Go (Dell Mobile)with 64 MB of Ram under Windows XP Pro.

[Craig Ramsay]

Adaptive degradation helps rotate and move objects quickly in a viewport that is trying to display a lot of geometry. It does this by displaying objects by their bounding boxes when they are being transformed (moved, rotated, scaled).

 

You can toggle adaptive degradation on and off with the O key (O the letter not zero).

 

Hope that helps

[Francois Yenny]

Craig,

 

Thanks for your reply. However the situation I'm describing is when I'm not transforming anything. I just can't seem to get a shaded display in any viewport in my scene.

 

To help give you, or anybody else who has an idea, some more insight on this, I can add that when I aply a modifier to a geometry, or move it etc. it then appears shaded while the other, non "updated" objects still show up as hidden lined wireframe. Also, if I start a new scene and just create a couple of boxes, the shaded view works fine.

 

Is this related to my hardware, or to the fact that I'm using OpenGL as the viewport display driver. On that note, it says in the HELP file that if this option is available it implies that my hardware supports it. Is this so, and if so are there limitations.

 

Thanks again in advance to all those who'll chip in their two cents worth.