Reducing Scene size - Collapse the stack or not ?

[Adam H. Stewart]

This might sound like a really really stupid question but it recently came up in a conversation with another 3ds artist. I am doing a large scene - and have a couple of hundred objects. The scene has become very bulky and slow. I am trying to Optomize and always presumed that by collapsing the stack of Modifiers to Edit Poly would make the scene lighter and more manageable. The other 3ds artist said just the opposite that he leaves objects with all the modifiers intact as 3ds has more problems dealing with Polygons then a bunch of modifiers in the stack.

What has your experience been ?

Should I collapse the lot to Edit Poly ? or even better Edit Mesh ?

Thanks for your help.

[percydaman]

definitely collapse the stack. much harder for max to remember all those modifiers. And max has to convert everything to polys when it renders anyhow.

not sure which is better editable poly or editable mesh.

[instinct]

Editable mesh uses less memory and performs way better...so go for editable mesh whenever possible!

Thorsten

[Adam H. Stewart]

Thanks Guys

Thanks guys - as I suspected the scene it much happier with things as Edit Polys - now I'll reduce even further to Mesh. I'll have to break the news to my fellow 3ds artist gently as he was quite convinced of his logic about Modifiers being easier for 3ds to work with.

[instinct]

On bigger Scenes it is not only eating performance (as all the modifiers have to be processed all the time, BUT uses more space too, as additionally to the base object data it needs to store all the modifier parameters...and if you´re network rendering all that will be sent to the server and from the server to all slaves....it´s an all-around bog-down

Thorsten

[natty]

Yep ...collapse everything !! ... once you are confident with your model.

[RErender]

*unless there are instances

[dbuchhofer]

a simple turn to mesh modifier thrown on top can help viewport response a lot for heavy objects that you can't collapse as yet.

Collapsing will reduce the ram and also the disk space an object takes up, as it keeps a copy of the geometry at many stack levels.

mesh select instead of edit mesh for passing selections up

instancing/refrencing low level similar geometry rocks also, once you figure it out

[Adam H. Stewart]

Great !!

I spent most of yesterday reducing to Mesh and cleaning up my scene - I must say it is a very liberating experience - and the performance is way up. I still have a couple general questions on the same subject:

An object built by another modeller was given to me with a path deform modifier. This doesn't want to collapse or convert to mesh - when I do that is looses the path deform. The object is a pipe that has been bent along an angle spline - would putting a mesh modifier ontop of the stack help reduce the size of this object?

I have been attaching objects to clean them up - this creates lots of multi-materials but as the object remembers it's attached parts (and you can still tweak)I find it an easier way to work - but does this reduce file size? Having one object as opposed to having say 10 objects with the same polycount ?

The other question is more general work flow - I started using the Schematic view and found is very helpful. It is really hard to navigate at first and a bit of pain as you see everything in your scene whether you want to or not ( you can filter but the filters aren't that good - i.e. if you choose to see only the selected objects they dissapear as soon as they are deselected - you can't really work with them, Hidden objects in the viewport are still appear in the Schematic view ) So my question is do you use this view at all ? or is it a bit of a turkey tool that was added but isn't functional.


Thanks as always.

[instinct]

Considering the PathDeform. It prolly is a world-space path-deform binding and hence is added on top of the modifier stack...and it will stay there or loose effect :P If you really wanna get it down to an editable mesh you´d have to do a snapshot of the object

Greetings,
Thorsten

[rpc212]

Rerender why would you not collapse instances to editable mesh?

Sorry if that is a stupid question.

[RErender]

Because they won't be instances any more

[mike_kennedy]

Attaching the object that's using path deform to a box, re-apply the path deform and snap shot that will result in a clean version as an editable mesh in the proper world space location. A poorly modeled object will be harder to snap shot.
Cheers
Mike

[rpc212]

Dooh!

[trixian]

Alternately you can right-click the modifier before the wsm, and choose "collapse to", then go to the hierarchy tab and reset the transforms and fix the pivot if necessary.