VW not rendering anthing other than wireframe

[jooly007]

I am a student with a design module to hand in on Jan 14th and my upgraded VW2011 that worked fine before is now not rendering anything other than wireframe. It came up with not enough memory and I have since moved stuff around on my laptop to get more hard disk space. I have 19.9GB free of 111GB on my C drive and 56.6GB free of 72.2GB on my D drive.

I have Windows Vista Home Premium SP2, an Acer Aspire 6530G laptop with a AMD Turion 2ghz processor which should have 4gb ram and a 32 bit operating system. my graphics card is ATI Mobility Radeon HD3650. I have version 2011 SP2(build 135291) on a student licence so have Renderworks and Designer.

I have also noticed that when I go to upload an image for a new texture or background that the preview box is black and if I try to upload an image then it stays black in use...and then changes all the previous textures in the file to black as well.

The only thing I can think of that has been different has been that I imported some .3ds models, which I was told I could. Each model of a chair seems to be over 4000 polygons in size. Individually they were able to be rendered, but now that can't happen and in the files they don't render at all. Could they have corrupted my VW?

Basically, I am designing a cocktail bar, bar and restaurant for my final module and have to hand in Jan 14th and now cannot do anything. Even creating basic shapes and models is taking ten times as long as normal.

Please can anyone help me as soon as possible and before Christmas as I am desperate. Thanks

[bcd]

Try giving the chairs a discreet class then turn that off and see if you can render the rest of your model successfully.

Also, are you rendering a Design Layer or a Viewport on a SheetLayer.

You can re-set the ppi of the Sheet Layer to allow you quickly render in low quality: useful to get it right. Then bump up the ppi again and export the Sheet Layer selecting the "Update visible out-of-date viewports prior to rendering" box in the PDF export dialogue.

[Benson Shaw]

Did you make lots of duplicates of the chairs? That can slow up VW actions. You will save lots of file size and render capacity by making a symbol of each chair type. If you can limit chair types, that's even better. Then duplicate the symbol(s).

Multiple symbol instances take up waaaay less file and render resources than object dupes.

-B

[islandmon]

Similar corruption issues often occur with DXF/DWG import... and they may prove very difficult to untangle...

recalling Murphy's 13th Rule : always import code into a clean new file ...

never import dynamic code into a working file unless you are absolutely certain of the outcome ...

( as in the case of static image files ).

That being said... follow all previous suggestions ... if that don't work...

then... bend over ...

welcome to the club : )