Hi,

some times I get the viewports not shown. Now I found, that if I enable testsetaalevel at Rhino and start MOI, than the viewports are not shown. Interesting is, if I disable the AA mode of Rhino, than MoI works like expected and if I enable AA at Rhino again, than MoI works fine too.

Regards,
Micha

That error always came when "Hardware Acceleration" has been turned down, usually for screen recording software.

Might that be the case?

No, it's set at full acceleration, I only enable the testsetaalevel at Rhino.

Hi Micha, do you have a video card with a pretty limited amount of memory (Video RAM) on it? What are the specs for your card?

The only thing I can really think of is that using AA in Rhino probably consumes quite a lot more memory from your video card's available resources which then does not leave enough video memory available for MoI to allocate video memory buffers for its own use.

Also if it has been a long time since you have updated your video driver, it may be a good idea to do that since maybe it is some bug in the video driver relating to having OpenGL (which Rhino uses by default) and Direct3D (which MoI uses) active at the same time.


At any rate, that message is only shown by MoI when there was an error reported to MoI by Windows when MoI attempted to initialize the Direct3D display system.

Most often this is due to an older card that does not have support for the bit depths that MoI needs to use, or if someone has turned off hardware acceleration to make a screencap system work, which is why that message talks about these things.

But there are other possible ways for Direct3D to fail to initialize such as insufficient video memory.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

it's Nvidia GeForce 7600GT 256MB. The driver is from oct 2008. But maybe the video memory was the problem, because the rhino viewport show some large textures. At MoI v1 it was the same.

Thanks,
Micha

Hi Micha, yes large textures will also consume a lot of video memory as well, if they are particularly high in resolution it can be surprising the amount that they take up.

For example a 4096x4096 image will take up 4 bytes per pixel, so that is

4096x4096x4 = 67108864 bytes = 64 MB .


Normally a 256MB card is plenty for typical usage, but if you are often going to have several very large textures, you might consider upgrading beyond that.

It's also not a bad idea to resize the textures in an image processing program to be somewhat smaller in pixel size.

MoI will automatically resize textures (used for background images) to a maximum size of 2048 (settable in moi.ini, [View] MaxTextureSize=2048) to avoid consuming too much video memory, since video memory is a lot more limited system resource than main system memory. I don't know if there is a similar setting in Rhino, but if there is maybe it is set a bit too high for a 256MB card and should be lowered on your system to cap the maximum texture size that is sent to the video card.

- Michael

An other screen issue, not important, but maybe you like to fix it. If the numerical field is open and I swap to an other WINDOWS application, than I see the num pad allways. Attached a screenshot with open web browser.

Hi Micha, yup that's bug in v2 (not present in v1) - it was previously reported here: http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=2341.6 and is fixed up for the next v2 beta.

- Michael