complaints about 3DS Max

[JeffG2]

How about a completely new materials editor - max's editor seems so far behind the times and realy clunky and horrible to use. The LightWave materials editior used to be a joy to use, especially with multiple textures on the same material.

Here here!!!

[studioDIM]

Definitely include the fact, that work with max above lets say 10.000 objects in one scene is real pain. And this goes for objects with lots of sub elements inside a single mesh(for example trees). Max tools seem to fail above a number of objects. For example, if I want to apply some changes to an onyx tree just before I export it to a proxy, I have to restart max several times to keep it from crashing. A restart every time I apply a modifier. (for example a push to the leaves) Also, selecting and transforming many objects is way too slow.

We often work with large scale scenes with more than 10-20 thousand objects (proxy vegetation, people, other proxy props) so this is a major issue for us. This goes for selecting instances too. Selecting 100 objects is almost instant, when selecting for example 1560 light fixtures (in a scene I'm currently working on) takes almost 30 seconds, there is a quite noticeable decrease in performance above a certain number of things.

And also note that the attach feature in editable poly seems to mess up the memory. Attaching multiple objects at the same time (trough attach multiple command) kills max slowly.

type gc() in the script listener (pinkie to the bottom left) to free the undo buffers and clean up the memory.
The issue has also to do with the way the undo is handled.
Try setting it to the lowest (be it 0 or 1) in the preferences, and see if it helps.

Lele

[Dynedain]

The Mirror tool in max has a weird bug I've always wondered about...it mirrors, but say in the case of target lights, leaves the icon of the light in the wrong direction. There are more problems with it under the hood if you try to export to real-time apps like Eon (or go to Maxwell). People say to use the mirror modifier, but it doesn't have as nice of functionality IMHO....

e.

That's because the mirror tool simply does a scale of -100% in whichever axis you choose (and moves the result according to your offset value of course)

[Dynedain]

Definitely include the fact, that work with max above lets say 10.000 objects in one scene is real pain. And this goes for objects with lots of sub elements inside a single mesh(for example trees). Max tools seem to fail above a number of objects. For example, if I want to apply some changes to an onyx tree just before I export it to a proxy, I have to restart max several times to keep it from crashing. A restart every time I apply a modifier. (for example a push to the leaves) Also, selecting and transforming many objects is way too slow.

We often work with large scale scenes with more than 10-20 thousand objects (proxy vegetation, people, other proxy props) so this is a major issue for us. This goes for selecting instances too. Selecting 100 objects is almost instant, when selecting for example 1560 light fixtures (in a scene I'm currently working on) takes almost 30 seconds, there is a quite noticeable decrease in performance above a certain number of things.

And also note that the attach feature in editable poly seems to mess up the memory. Attaching multiple objects at the same time (trough attach multiple command) kills max slowly.

type gc() in the script listener (pinkie to the bottom left) to free the undo buffers and clean up the memory.
The issue has also to do with the way the undo is handled.
Try setting it to the lowest (be it 0 or 1) in the preferences, and see if it helps.

Lele

Well, it's also because Max sucks when it comes to lots of objects. A single object with millions of polys is fine, but a thousand objects with 100 polys each is a nightmare. It's because of the internal scene object list in max. And if groups are involved... it's 10X worse.

[EricKlein]

The Mirror tool in max has a weird bug I've always wondered about...it mirrors, but say in the case of target lights, leaves the icon of the light in the wrong direction. There are more problems with it under the hood if you try to export to real-time apps like Eon (or go to Maxwell). People say to use the mirror modifier, but it doesn't have as nice of functionality IMHO....

e.

That's because the mirror tool simply does a scale of -100% in whichever axis you choose (and moves the result according to your offset value of course)

Interesting...so why doesn't it do it like the mirror modifier? or, why doesn't the mirror modifier have the same problems?

e.

[studioDIM]

Ah yes, dynedain, i didn't mean that max was great :P
It's just that the way it handles undos (it includes selections and such) it really a bitch on processing power and memory.
The garbage collection method was just a tiny drop in a sea of s**t...

Lele

[charleyc]

Well, it's also because Max sucks when it comes to lots of objects. A single object with millions of polys is fine, but a thousand objects with 100 polys each is a nightmare. It's because of the internal scene object list in max. And if groups are involved... it's 10X worse.

Max9 is a bit better with this, and it seems that R10 is going to go a lot further with performance issues.

[Dynedain]

Well, it's also because Max sucks when it comes to lots of objects. A single object with millions of polys is fine, but a thousand objects with 100 polys each is a nightmare. It's because of the internal scene object list in max. And if groups are involved... it's 10X worse.

Max9 is a bit better with this, and it seems that R10 is going to go a lot further with performance issues.

Max 9 is a lot better for complex objects, but doesn't seem to be any better for scenes with many objects (from my experience). I pray 10 is better...

[charleyc]

I have a few scenes with several thousand objects in them that were created in R8. They are a little easier to handle in R9 for me. Although, I too hope that this is an area that is addressed in R10.

A very good help when dealing with large scenes is to use Maxscript for certain tasks. If you name your objects well, you can create simple little scipts that can hide/unhide, select or whatever your objects without using the normal select and command process. Also, you can script object attachments so that it does not save the progress to the undo memory. I use that when attaching anything over about 100 objects together. I have found that one major contributor to massive slowdown is when trying to display too many objects. If you have DX cache enabled, you can eat up a lot of memory real fast and it can slow things down as it tries to recache while you work. That can be memory and processing that you could be using for other tasks that can also require a lot when you have that many objects. Displaying objects as box's helps a lot in this regaurd as it won't try and cache.

[sv]

Duplicate script problems due to the copying of all scripts to the local users' macroscripts dir
INI FILES. WTF WERE YOU THINKING.
No unified place to change and edit local texture paths on multiple machines since the 3dsmax.ini file is now in the user directory.
PLX PLACE THE USER DIRECTORY IN A MORE OBSCURE PLACE NEXT TIME. i mean, C:\Documents and Settings\dbuchhofer\Local Settings\Application Data\Autodesk\3dsmax\9 - 32bit\enu is much too short and easily found/accessed.

Workaround or notification so as to avoid the 600 minute timeout when using a backburner manager that doesn't have the same version of Max installed on it as the job that was sent. (Problem comes up a FUCKINGLOT with new people and new farms)

good rant.
couldn't agree more.
well done.

[posterus]

max 10?
how about they move away from the yearly releases. the "ok its october, lets just ship what we have so far and fix it later" stagegy may not be the best idea for max

[putyi]

type gc() in the script listener (pinkie to the bottom left) to free the undo buffers and clean up the memory.
The issue has also to do with the way the undo is handled.
Try setting it to the lowest (be it 0 or 1) in the preferences, and see if it helps.
Lele

I've been using the gc() function (as far as I can remember since you suggested its use here on the forums earlier) but in some cases it's useless. For example the attach method creates phantom memory allocation, or I don't know a better way to describe the phenomenon. When attaching multiple poly heavy objects together (usually onyx vegetation, I always fine tune mapping, projection, vertex colors etc in separate mesh groups) page file usage grows bigger and bigger and bigger, til eventually max reports that it has run out of memory, and needs to close. At this point, if I choose to save, it usually corrupts the backup, and also (!) the file I was working on. Meanwhile, the OS reports that max is using about 50 megs during the operation, and the total physical memory usage is around 300-400 megs. For me this is simply weird.

Oh, and I second the rewritten shader editor. Shame that the potential (instancing, referencing, wiring, etc...) is in there, but the UI sucks big time.

[AJ Jefferies]

putyi - use Neil Blevins script attachSelectedObjects
available from his site : http://www.neilblevins.com/soulburns...urnscripts.htm

[AJ Jefferies]

One minor frustration... I'd like consistency between the major model/mesh types... i.e: Edit Poly, Edit Mesh & (to a lesser extent) Edit Spline all have their common functions (detach, weld...etc.), it would be nice if these were remotely in the same place.

Admittedly, I use shortcuts for most of these but whenever I have to quickly jump onto someone's machine to fix a problem my brain implodes.

Consistency between file browsing. I'd like file>open, file>view image, choose bitmap, merge file...etc to all have the same explorer layout... Dare I say it, the same history?

Wire Parameters. I'd quickly & easily like to see what objects/sliders/values my current selection is wired to. This might already be possible, I just haven't found it yet.

[charleyc]

Garbage Collection - gc() is more of an after the fact kind of thing. It clears the memory after it has been used. If you are getting crashes while attaching, you need a different solution. Try this script. www.charleycarlat.com/MaxScripts/MeshAttach.zip

It does not add memory to Undo as it attaches objects thus using nearly no resources other than processor. For the quickest results, don't attach more than 100-200 objects at a time. It will attach as many as you want, but it can take a long time to get them all attached if there are too many. Also, for the sake of speed, there is no progress bar, or anything indicating the script is working. Watch your cursor (shows the hourglass) and the selection count (will show 1 when it is finished). Finally, if you try and undo after running the script, you will probably get a crash.

Edit: AJ_23 beat me to the punch