[Radiance-general] rvu: too many modifiers in ambient list

[Lars O. Grobe]

Hi Greg!

> That explains the problem.  Because each new inclusion of a material 
> gets a new id, and this id needs to go into the ambient 
> include/exclude list for that modifier name, you will quickly overflow 
> your ambient exclude set if you incorporate a copy of your materials 
> for every object.

Ok, so if I define aliases, no new ids are created, right? I changed my 
scripts so that only a file (let's call it material.aliases) is cat'ed 
into the rad-scene-file, while the actual definitions of materials 
(material.mat) and modifying patterns (material.map) are passed only to 
oconv in the final processing step. I have about 20 aliases in my 
material.aliases file, and a lot of objects (radiance scene files), so 
I hope that these aliases won't need to have their own ids (if I 
calculate 200 objects, 200*20=4000 id's would already massively overrun 
all limits).

The next question arises with the use of obj2mesh. I use

obj2mesh -a material.mat -a material.map -a material.alias object.obj > 
object.rad

for each of my objects. I have to pass the mat and map files to 
obj2mesh, which behaves more like oconv and can't use just the aliases 
(and having the actual definitions linked later by oconv). So here I 
still get all these definitions for each object, will this count in my 
ambient list?

> This is bad practice in general because it means that most of your 
> memory is occupied with redundant material definitions rather than 
> geometry.

Yes. I guess I could solve all this if using only obj as cad input, 
using u/v-coordinates with obj2mesh to position and transform the maps 
and don't include any mappings into the scene files at all. However, I 
have a mixed model with dxf and obj, which developed before obj2mesh 
was released, and I am a bit suspicious concerning modeling apps and 
u/v.

I am currently trying to reduce the material definitions, but as you 
can see from my questions, I won't be able to change a lot if some of 
the points I mentioned are like I guess. In the worst case, I'd have to 
give up counting on speed-up by -ae.

Thank you for your answers, CU Lars.