A feeling a lot of us know all too well… Is the autosave thing always on? If not, I'd strongly urge you to leave it on.

Yeah the auto save is on at all times but when the program crashes I still lose whatever I did before the auto save which stinks. I’m noticing that it just keeps crashing and I have no idea why. Zmodeler was a pretty well stabled program till today when it started crashing constantly. After 6 hours of sitting in front of my computer working on this thing I only got like 3 and a half hours of work done.

What a waste of a day :-@

My only explanation as to why the program is crashing so much is that it can’t handle the car anymore. The detail I put into this model is more than it can handle I guess. If that is why then I don’t know what to do because there is still lots of things to be made.

If detail is the problem, then it might very well be a case of having to start from scratch and build a less detailed version. It might be a case that some detail just has to be rendered through texture rather than being a full 3D replica.

When I first started this project like 2 years ago my original plan was to texture on most of the parts onto the car. Then things well… kind of got out of hand and it became more of an obsession for me to make everything extremely detailed to the real thing.

I made 3D sun visors, 3D interior door handles, 3D seats and by that I mean the seats really have 3D cushioning, 3D interior ceiling lights. I even made a 3D defroster in the dashboard. I just can’t stop with the detail.

All I know is that if I keep going the way I am now I’ll end up with a 3D model ECTO-1 that’s so good every GB fan in the world will be dying to drive it in GTA.

But the downside is it might kill the game from memory lagging based on how detailed it is, or crash it completely if something happens with one of the high-poly panels flying off.

This thing is fudged up big time. I click to display an object in the program and the whole damn thing closes out on me. I’m trying to delete unneeded objects to free up space and it’s crashing out on me.

This is what I see every few minutes:


I got an idea though. I’m going to start a new file with Zmodeler and then import only the parts of the car I need into it. That way there will be more space in the program and I doubt it will crash because it will be an entirely new file.

I just don’t understand why. One day everything is fine and the next it’s crashing on me every few minutes.

Might be critical mass, as you mentioned earlier.

Alright I think I’m back on track now.

I kept trying different things and the program just kept crapping out. Then I had a great idea.

I went to file/export and exported the whole model and all its materials to .3ds format. Then I imported that new .3ds file into Zmodeler and it seems to be working fine now. It was getting so bad that I couldn’t even open then close the program without seeing an error message.

I guess the file size wasn't the problem after all.

But we all have Dyne to thank. Because .3ds format is what I made the model into before sending a copy to him so if it weren’t for Dyne I wouldn’t have even thought about putting the model into .3ds format.

The only bad part is when I put the model into .3ds format the shading got changed around but that doesn’t really matter because I’m going to be redoing the shading later.

Having the shading messed up some is a small price to pay compared to almost loosing 2 and half years of hard work. It's too bad I spent my weekend trying to get the program to work when I could have been getting work done on the model.

Here is what I was in the middle of when the program started crashing. I was making the grill 3D.

Before:


After:

Kingpin
Well, I sit corrected.

I figured the door got permanently closed when they built the computer console that occupies that chunk of the rear cabin.

No computer in the Ecto-1 (just the 1a). The door actually doesn't open anymore from the outside. But you could reach in from the front and open that side door if you really wanted to.