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Topic: Scaling affect memory usage?  (Read 7229 times)

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October 30, 2020, 07:04:38 pm
Sorry, I'm starting to discover questions I probably should've been asking twenty years ago

Lets say I have a 12 x 12 Sphere and it is the same size as the default plane so that the plane looks like a plate cutting through the center of the sphere...

Is that going to require more system resources to work with than if I had scaled the 12 x 12 sphere down so that it appeared as a ball resting in the center of a large field?

I had always assumed it was just poly count affecting system resources.

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October 31, 2020, 10:00:24 am
My guess is scale is just an array of 3 floats (4bytes per float)  in memory space, it shouldn't allocate any additional resources if the number is 1000 or 1, its still a float array. But IStonia can clarify :D
« Last Edit: October 31, 2020, 10:02:24 am by thor6136 »

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November 01, 2020, 08:43:54 am
My guess is scale is just an array of 3 floats (4bytes per float)  in memory space, it shouldn't allocate any additional resources if the number is 1000 or 1, its still a float array. But IStonia can clarify :D

Correct.

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November 02, 2020, 05:17:25 am
My guess is scale is just an array of 3 floats (4bytes per float)  in memory space, it shouldn't allocate any additional resources if the number is 1000 or 1, its still a float array. But IStonia can clarify :D

Correct.

Cool. Thanks, Peeps

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November 02, 2020, 09:40:07 pm
Yes, that most definitely shouldn't have any impact on memory.

Each vertex has a position defined by a 3D vector, which consists of three floating-point numbers defining a vertex position in space. Each one of those values has a constant amount of bits allocated in your computer's memory. It's predefined, so it doesn't matter if you scale your object by 0.0001 or 10,000 - the allocated memory for that variable (say, a vertex position on X axis) will always remain the same.

The only problem you may encounter with scaling, is the loss of precision when you cross the limits provided by 32-bit or 64-bit floating-point numbers - you will start getting strange "artifacts" all over your mesh (it will deform in unexpected ways).