Loooong File open time

[OPEN_RANGE]

I have an arch viz exterior scene with 9.5 million faces. There is a lot of Forest Pack 3D vegetation in the scene, all xref via the Forest Pack library. That is what is responsible for most of the faces.

When I open the scene it takes 12 minutes to load. After that I can work on the scene with no problem. File>Save only takes 5 seconds. Task Manager shows it using only 4.4 G RAM of the 64 available and no CPU usage when sitting there idle.

Does that 12 minute load time seem unusual? (Also when the the scene saves as Autobak it takes quite while. I haven't timed it but maybe a few minutes). My hardware/software setup is listed below. Thanks for any opinion or info on this.

[trick]

I have this behaviour on some Max2017 scenes too. Mostly on files that use Forest Pro with VRay proxies and some large HDRI for lighting, even if the files size is about 1Mbyte big, autosaving is exeptionally slow (+1 min), while normal saving is a fraction of a second.

[OPEN_RANGE]

thanks for your reply. sounds a bit different then my situation. file size 289 Mbyte. 9,5 million faces. No vray proxies. all trees, flowers, meadow grasses, etc xref in vis forest pack library. No HDRI. using Max 2018

BUT load time 12 minutes!! Is this "normal" or do I have hardware glitch or....?

[Morbid Angel]

I think the issue is visualizing the forest pro data in your viewport which what can take time. What happens if you turn off viewport visibily would it get any faster?

[OPEN_RANGE]

Thanks for your reply!

So the file, once loaded, works fine. It just seems unusual that it takes 12 minutes to load when first opened.

are you suggesting turning off viewport visibility of all the Forest Pack stuff before,closing the file, so that when it gets opened next time it might load/open quicker?

[Morbid Angel]

yes exactly. Or making viewport preview to be a fraction (a really small fraction) of actual render count. Max and generally direct x or open gl don't like too many objects, better to have one heavy object then a million boxes for example, it will slow things down for gpu.

[OPEN_RANGE]

I tried hiding all the forest Pack objects and saving the file before closing. Unfortunately that did not change anything. Still,takes,12 minutes to load/ open. Is that possibly ?normal? for a file of this size (9.5 million faces / 286 Mbyte)?

[Morbid Angel]

could be worth asking itoo devs about it. 12 minutes sounds quite long.

[werticus]

I've had the same issue with very large scenes with lots of trees that are xref. 15min load time. A frame takes that long to render

[OPEN_RANGE]

Thanks werticus. I always suspect that whatever issue is causing trouble or weird behavior is unique to my setup. Good to know others have had similar experience.

[werticus]

Well we are talking very very big scenes probably over 2gb with all the xref's which do need to load in, anima, cars, grasses, etc. City scale stuff:

[Oleg_Budeanu]

Definitely because of XRefs. So basically when you open 3dsmax it loads all the models from the xref list. If you have heavy trees there, for example, a file with a tree which is 500mb - it takes a while to load. Also, you can check if you have objects with huge modifier stack, for example subdivide and etc - that can take time also, when opening scene.

[DPS]

Another possible remedy (if your file sizes seem larger than what is the norm and careful as this will break some things (groups, sun sky assembly, object links etc)): in all files starting with the XREFs, go File> New>Keep Objects (without Hierarchy).

I recently received a file from someone and this was the only remedy. If you copied any of the components from this scene into a new one it would 'infect' the new one.

And if your scene crashes when trying to do this - I'm guessing the reason is that there is a particular hierarchy than Max can't break - and in my case I needed to remove the 'helper' objects that were driving a Vray Distance Tex.

[OPEN_RANGE]

Thank you for that info DPS. I suspect my issue is more as Oleg states. Heavy xref trees, grass, mulch.

[Richard7666]

Definitely because of XRefs. So basically when you open 3dsmax it loads all the models from the xref list. If you have heavy trees there, for example, a file with a tree which is 500mb - it takes a while to load. Also, you can check if you have objects with huge modifier stack, for example subdivide and etc - that can take time also, when opening scene.

Yep, this. I generally limit myself to a handful of tree and car models because of this.

Although, I wonder if loading assets from an SSD is significantly quicker? Should probably test this some day.