Animating 100's of objects

[Neilg]

I've been doing a buildup sequence using all hand keyed objects, and the client wanted it extending by a few blocks - however once copying the objects out it's taking anywhere from 30-40seconds to register each mouse click in max.

Theres 240 objects, all animated, but only 120k polys in the scene.

This cant be normal, right?

Is it because they're instanced/in groups and max is having a hard time keeping track, or could it be something else?

[jacksc02]

max will be having a hard time computing everything on screen.
Try setting objects your not editing to "box" display
Do the frames wake a while to process before rendering?

[Neilg]

It's not too bad, takes a while but it's nothing silly.

Setting display to boxes helps a little, still pretty slow though. Is this just how it goes for doing this kind of work?

[jacksc02]

can be.
How much is in the stack of the objects?
Is everything collapsed before you do the building up?

[Neilg]

It's mostly basic edit poly, but I think I may have found the culprit.

Some objects are made up of a fair few objects - all edit poly, then grouped, with an edit poly on top of that then instanced 20+ times.

Reckon thats what's throwing it off?
I could have organised the scene a little better but I started it about 2 hours ago and my deadline for rendering is 6 hours from now...

[jacksc02]

that could probably be it.

[joconnell]

Groups are bad in max - adds in another level of tree structure it doesn't want to deal with - parenting / nulls / selection sets are the way to go. Anecdotally max has been bad in dealing with large amounts of objects too - fine with high poly counts, just not high object counts.

[Neilg]

I've been ungrouping my finished parts of the animation and converting them to selection sets and it's steadily getting faster - nearly half way through and it's quite manageable now.


Never got into parents or nulls, i'll have a look into that.