LIME FAQ

No matter the size of your company or organisation, we are confident that LIME has an option to suit. We offer commercial and educational licensing as:

• Hardware-locked (best for single computers and/or off-site access)
• Floating (best for centrally-managed IT administration, and sharing license keys between users or locations)

We offer LIME on an annual subscription basis. See our Pricing page for more details. Contact us if you have any questions about licensing.

Yes, Fonix Geoscience is committed to supporting educational environments around the world through our educational licensing. We have options for individual staff, researchers and students, through to full organisational units such as research groups or departments. See our Educational Pricing page for more details.

We have put together a recommendation for a minimum specification that should be easy to meet. In short it means having enough RAM and a dedicated graphics card, such as from NVIDIA. LIME will run without the dedicated graphics card, though not all features may be supported, or performance may suffer.

Use of tiled 3D models is the best way to bypass the conventional need for high performance workstations.

On Windows, LIME needs some basic system files to be present before it can run. These are often already part of the Windows operating system, or installed with other software. If you are getting a warning about missing dlls, such as vcruntime140.dll, then the chances are you are missing these system files. Fortunately, this is normally an easy fix. Head to the official Microsoft page and download and install the latest supported Visual C++ redistributable (Visual Studio 2015, 2017, 2019 and 2022 for X64 architecture).

Yes, LIME can be run in stereo for active and passive powerwalls, 3D displays etc., as well as with "classic" anaglyph (red/cyan) glasses. For true stereo, your graphics card must support quad buffer stereo.

Absolutely, LIME has been developed for being able to visualise mm-scale to regional sections and multiple localities from around the world in the same session!

Standard model formats (e.g. OBJ, FBX formats) require that all data fits into the main computer memory, which can be problematic for large/multiple models. LIME functionality for large data handling:

• Supports tiled 3D models
• Streaming tiled models from disk and cloud sources (e.g. V3Geo)
• Generate tiled models from standard 3D model formats

Export the model as Wavefront OBJ (*.obj). If the model is georeferenced, select the appropriate projected coordinate system (for example UTM, national grid or local coordinates). Models exported with a geographic coordinate system (i.e. lat/long) are not compatible at this time.

Increase the Texture count parameter when building the texture. Using the default Texture count (set to 1 in the screenshot below) will result in coarse, pixelated texture for larger models. Recommended value depends on your camera's image resolution, but can be 10 or more. It is recommended to keep Texture size at 4096 to be widely compatible on a range of hardware.

Acquisition hardware and processing software evolves rapidly - it is easy to generate massive 3D models that can bring our computers to their knees in terms of performance - even with a high amount of RAM and a decent graphics card. Fortunately, LIME has been developed with large datasets in mind.

For standard machines (see our suggested minimum hardware spec), we recommend up to around 5 million triangles in a single model section. This value is advisory, as it also depends on the size and number of texture images (for textured models). Textured models come with a number of additional image files, which all need to fit in the graphics memory. If a model has many triangles and lots of high resolution texture images then performance can suffer.

Fortunately, many 3D model processing software packages offer options to optimise the resolution of generated 3D triangle meshes and texture resolution.

An even better way to deal with this is with tiled models (split up into a level of detail - LOD - hierarchy for fast streaming on demand). LIME's visualisation framework is designed for these models, so for large areas or high resolution datasets, this may be the only efficient way to load all your data. LIME includes functionality for generating tiled models from standard 3D model formats (e.g. OBJ).

Please reference the following paper when citing LIME:

Buckley, S.J., Ringdal, K., Naumann, N., Dolva, B., Kurz, T.H., Howell, J.A., Dewez, T.J.B., 2019. LIME: Software for 3-D visualization, interpretation, and communication of virtual geoscience models, Geosphere, 15(1): 222-235. doi:10.1130/GES02002.1.

In addition, if you find LIME useful for your work, we would appreciate acknowledgement of the software in presentations or publications based on LIME outputs.