viewports

[giraffe]

hi friends
I have problem with viewport speed.
I wonder how u work...
sometimes I read on forums that people work with 8million poly.
I dont know how they can manage to do that...
when my scene is >2million, then viewport gets so so so slow.
sometimes scene is less than 1million poly and I merge an object (tree for example) that is 700.000 poly. and it is so hard to move that object or rotate etc...
I work in layers. but that is not enough.
I mean when I want to move that object, rotate etc, it is terrible thing.
moreover I it becomes so hard to save scene.

I wonder if it is something I do wrong...
my videocard is 7900GT.
my pc is opteron 265 x2 cpu
4gb ram
asus k8dn-l mainboard.

I wish to learn how u work and manage ur viewports.
thanks

[aphex79]

the 8mill poly scene is on a 64 bits machine/os.. what os do you have?

[priad]

When I work with high poly scene, or when it's very slow like there, I put all that I can in bounding box in the viewport, for example vegetation or other little things which aren't needed to be view in rest of the process.

[instinct]

nope...workin on 32bit with 9mio polys too...not really fun tho.

Suggestion #1 : with that card degfinately use direct3d
Suggestion #2 : upgrade to R9 as viewports are a lot faster

Kind Regards,
Thorsten

[mcvltd]

I find viewport updates a real fraustration (max9 - 32bit - 1.5mil polys) it seems like I spend half my time waiting for things to refresh.

I had to go back and use lightwave the other day and was blown away by how quick the viewports were!

The only thing that seems to speed things up a little is to have just one viewport displayed instead of four.

Rob.

[thablanch]

I never use more than 1 viewport, screen real estate is too important to work with more than one.

Keep the vegetation on separate layers...

But yes, Max could/should be a lot faster for this

[zoranm]

I guess we all have simmilar problem. Mine starts with more than 2M polies (and I'm on dual opteron 280 +Quadro FX 4500). What I use is: good organisation of scene, converting to boxed mode whatever is not necessary at the moment and Object Display Culling, as a last resort.
Disabling viewports that are not used (or converting them to Box mode) helps a lot too. As far as driver setting goes I often switch between all three of tham (z-buffer, OGL and D3D). For extremely big scenes D3D worked the best for me.
Hope this helps a little

Regards
Zoran

[SnipeyX]

Only time I ever switch out of D3D is when I need to work with animated characters (openGL) D3D's "Use cached D3D meshes" is invaluable for high poly scenes. Also, work in only one viewport, and also I turn off the edged faces mode except for the object I have selected. After that, it's just scene management, mainly with layers.

[studioDIM]

Only time I ever switch out of D3D is when I need to work with animated characters (openGL) D3D's "Use cached D3D meshes" is invaluable for high poly scenes. Also, work in only one viewport, and also I turn off the edged faces mode except for the object I have selected. After that, it's just scene management, mainly with layers.

Ditto!
I'd add the precious alt+Q to isolate a selection for quick modelling/UVing tweaks


Lele

[DaForce]

I spend my whole time in isolation


wait... that came out wrong... damn it

[giraffe]

thanks for replies
I usually work in layers and display them as box too.
but that is not enough for me.
when I want to adjust place of trees or sometimes rotate a highpoly model in an interior.
anyway I think everyone has similar problems.
so now Iknow that it is not caused by a mistake I make.
thx a lot again.

[studioDIM]

if it is not modelling, just make sure you turn off "shaded faces" (or wireframe on shaded).
That alone will enable proper mesh caching, resulting in a HUGE speed boost for standard transformations (SRT) at object level (ie. not at vertex, face or edge level).

Lele

[tricky]

Well we're about to take delivery of new workstations that use the latest and greatest ATI 1GB graphics card. Though, to be perfectly honest, I am not expecting great things. I am yet to be impressed with any vid card in Max.

[percydaman]

Well we're about to take delivery of new workstations that use the latest and greatest ATI 1GB graphics card. Though, to be perfectly honest, I am not expecting great things. I am yet to be impressed with any vid card in Max.

Thats the spirit. You just have to temper any enthusiasm when it comes to max and viewport speed. There's no magic bullet. Just crappy performance