MAX Frustrations

[glorybound]

No, there were other options, so I didn't mess with it that much.

[Vizioen]

I also took a look at the file, didn't have any textures though.

I would've thrown myself out the window if I had to work with that speed. As already said. Having 50 000 objects in a viewport really is the big culprit. What I tend to do is if I want to have everything in the same file and not use xrefs: for every building, I join all objects with the same materials in one poly. Unless your building has more than 50 materials that's not that big of an issue. You can group them afterwards.

Proxy scattering (if its only a few buches I just use object paint) I leave that to a scatter plugin like forestpack or multiscatter.

As for the rest try putting objects like lantarns or railings in 1 poly instead of 17 different pieces not only to keep object count to a minimum but also to be able to select things faster.

[cheerioboy]

Does freezing visible layers help with performance? I know in one project I keep some of the larger geometries on a layer that is frozen that I'll toggle visibility on/off when needed for rendering

[super gnu]

Hey Bobby. no offence, but you are complaining about max being slow with 50,000 objects in a scene and railings made of 17 objects..

you just had a thread recently about working with big scenes, and all the advice you got, was to attach everything into fewer objects, split by material etc etc.....

max hates lots of objects.
max doesnt mind a few high poly ones.
attaching stuff together isnt a problem cos you can always detach again after.

for things like lamp posts i usually end up attaching them all together as soon as i can. you can still move/delete/edit at the subobject level.

save things like that out in a seperate file before attaching, just in case you need the original pivot points for something.

stuff like trees are best left separate ( id never attach a load of trees together) but proxied. get em in the right place, set to "disp. as box" and chuck them out into an xref you can disable while working.

buildings i usually split by material, so an entire building might be 5-15 objects named for the material and building. group em (i dont have a problem with groups) or, if you hate groups, stick each on a layer.

if you know a building is finished, you can attach the whole thing together and proxy it out.

ive done 50sq km masterplans with 100's of buildings, tens of thousands of proxy trees, cars, people, plants etc. etc. and max has been fine. its just about workflow.

[glorybound]

Yes. I worked through all of that and it's moving much better now. I think the lights were the biggest culprit.

[glorybound]

I have one plant species that has 27636 instances. They are proxies; how should this be done? I used the graphite paint tool to place them.

[Vizioen]

Replace them with a forestpack object and use splines to define the areas?

[glorybound]

That's what I thought. Not on this one; but for sure on the next one.

Replace them with a forestpack object and use splines to define the areas?

[3LP]

You should definitely check out forest pack, it will change your life like day and night.

Stan

[glorybound]

I have it, and I use it, but it seems to fail on larger things.

[3LP]

Fail where manually placed works? That's a bit surprising.
Don't hesitate to post your issues so someone can help you out with FPP as it's way better to handle massive amounts of instances

Stan

[glorybound]

When I place grass on a large plane, no grass renders and I get the view stats error. I look at the stats and it mentions something about maximum display reached. If I add more than, let's see three FP areas, it doesn't render those areas either. I'll give more specifics when I try it again.

[super gnu]

you have to increase the object and polygon limits in forestpack. by default they are too low to do grass and stuff like that.

[glorybound]

where do you do that?

you have to increase the object and polygon limits in forestpack. by default they are too low to do grass and stuff like that.

[super gnu]

for setup. , i usually just crank the limits to the sky.. that way you know what you set is what you get.

be careful you dont accidentally tell it to give you 1,000,000,000 trees (start at a high "distribution density units" setting and gradually reduce until you are happy)

you can also turn on "collisions" with a lower radius to ensure you get some overlap, but arent just piling loads of instances on top of each other.

if using point cloud display, i usually turn density there to 100% too, otherwise youre not seeing the true picture.


then once it looks good density wise, you can reduce the "viewport item limit" and point cloud density, to keep your scene fluid..