Large setup slowing to a crawl

[Streetwise]

I'm setting up an interior render of several groups of furniture. I'm working in Wireframe mode to help performance, but my machine is up to 15GB RAM usage (out of 16) and things have slowed to a crawl. My poly's (so far) are 5,643,513, and Verts 4,778,936. Anything I can do to get around this slowness?

[Joelaff]

I find wireframe is MUCH slower than shaded for most scenes. So I would start by trying shaded without edges. You can set some viewports to Disabled so they don't auto-update ("d" key is default shortcut).

Are you talking about viewport performance only, or rendering? Is it animation playback performance where some rig or constraint is slowing things down, or just the viewport panning and orbiting (and camera)?

You can hide some of your polys using an Off In Renderer Delete Mesh modifier.

You could convert some static objects to VRay Meshes, and adjust their display to bounding box or similar. This will affect render speed, but usually not terribly.

You could try XRef Objects with a low res object stand-in.

You could try the substitute modifier to display a low res model in the viewport.

Max is much faster with a few objects with high poly counts than with lots of little objects. You could attach some objects if this is the case. (Likely only makes a difference with hundreds... and this can increase render speed dramatically in some cases.)

Be sure your macro recorder is off.

[Streetwise]

I'm talking about viewport performance, plus the RAM usage. With each piece of furniture I add into the scene, the RAM will jump up almost a GB. With that said, the furniture has all of the "guts" in it (hardware, shelves, connectors, etc). I always thought that stuff didn't make a difference. Would it help if I stripped everything out that wasn't needed? Working with viewport shading is a bit faster. Didn't realize that. Thanks. In the meantime,

[Joelaff]

Any part of the model that won't affect the final image should likely be removed for performance. If those parts are all individual objects this could make an even bigger difference.

Hiding stuff you don't need by using things like DeleteMesh (off in renderer) will also make a huge difference.

Are there a lot of texturemaps?

[Streetwise]

No, not many texture maps at all. Maybe about 50 at this point.

As I work with the file, my RAM steadily increases to the point which Windows 7 will issues an out-of-memory error and then crash. When I re-start and open the .max file, it is initially about 5-6. What is weirder is if I just let it sit, I can watch the RAM steadily climb. For instance, I over the past couple of minutes, it has climbed up to 15GB for no reason.

So it sounds like I should open up each piece of furniture and strip out the individual objects then.

[flino2004]

Divide your file in multiple xref so you could figure it out where is the problem.... On top of that what you have in place working well I would set them as bounded box for display. (Working with layers also helps a lot.)

[artmaknev]

It won't hurt to try this script, maybe you have thousands of re-timers or notetracks that slows down the file and messes up with your ram somehow:

http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/cleaner

If you have alot of garbarge, this script will freeze for awhile, just let it do its work come back in 20 min or so.

[Streetwise]

Hi All,

Thanks for the help! It turns out that one of the pieces of furniture had a ProOptimizer modifier attached to the geometry. Not sure why that slowed things to a crawl, but once I removed all of the instances of it, it works great now!

[artmaknev]

Thats good to know about proOptimizer!