13. MORE EXPENSIVE, AND LESS POWERFUL

One challenge that I didn't foresee was the challenge of hardware. I am cheap, and so I get cheap computers. This has advantages and disadvantages. When I first began working on "the Music of Erich Zann" (the summer of 2015), I had just purchased a new MacBookPro. I didn't buy this computer to perform animation, as my experience using Macs for 3D animation was always a poor one.

(In fact, I remember installing Windows on a previous Mac I owned, and on that one machine, the OSX side wouldn't run the 3D application at all, but the Windows side would run it very nicely. This taught me that OSX seems not to be adequately designed to run 3D applications, despite the fact that the hardware runs it fine via Windows.)

But because this was a new 'MacBookPro' (granted, the lowest priced model), I decided to see what it would be like to run a 3D application on it. Unlike my previous experience, the machine actually ran the software! I was excited, so I began the project, and created most everything over the course of the next year on that Mac.

However, I quickly saw that my ambition to create a high quality animation ran up against walls on this machine. The polygon count on this exterior shot quickly ballooned beyond the capacity of the hardware. I was accustomed to this challenge on my previous projects, so I simply created low-resolution stand-in models for the biggest culprits in this scene. I would then assign different layers that I could toggle on and off when moving around the scene became too much of a hassle for the machine. This solution didn't solve all the problems, however, as the high resolution set was still in the scene (though invisibly hidden), and still slowed down the computer (perhaps eating up RAM, but I'm not certain about such issues).

So, all that is just to say that my ambition to create higher quality animation than I had in the past was challenged by my hardware. It seems, however, that I could have tried to work smarter, not harder. That is, I wonder if I could have tried to exploit great texturing effects (which I've already stated was beyond my abilities) in order to present a nice visual style. Well, I didn't try that, so polygon count seemed to explode in my scene. I didn't even have characters yet! 

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