3dsmax and viewports

[flipside]

Hi,

I am working on a big scene of a bridge placed in an environment. There are lots of trees and houses etc... I use the powerrhinotomax plugin to import my rhino model (everything is modeled in rhino) into max. This keeps the rhino data intact in max and creates a mesh at rendertime. So in the viewport I have only nurbs surface lines. (not shaded)

here's how it looks like in max(the white is where the bridge is, I can't show it)


I was wondering why moving in viewports is so slow in max. I don't think it's because of the rhinotomax plugin, because I assume that some nurbs lines are less heavy in the viewport than a million polygons.

The whole scene is ready, but placing cameras and adjusting them is really frustrating because everything I do has a delay of a few seconds. The same model in rhino moves very fast (even in shaded mode it moves faster than wireframe view in max). Also simply selecting some stuff takes a long time, really frustrating to work with.


What could I do to speed up the viewport? Is this a purely graphics card problem? I have an ati radeon 9800pro, dual xeon 2.8 and 1 gig ram.

I have to set up my cameras in wireframe mode which is not very usefull. I hide as much as I can to speed it up, but I need the trees on for example to see if the camera isn't inside one or something like that.

The scene is big but not complex, trees are cilinders and spheres, houses are extruded shapes etc... All modeling is very basic. If I have to do a scene in the future like this, but with more detailed environment I have no clue how to do it.

I want to avoid xrefs because I have had many troubles with them in the past.

How do you guys work on complex scenes in max? I've seen posts of airports with detailed architecture and stuff like that here, how do you manage to work on such heavy scenes??

Any help, suggestions and thoughts about this matter are highly appreciated

kind regards,

wouter

[caustic angel]

hi!

the problem is the high standard tesselation of imported nurbs objects in max.
you can adjust these settings in the nurbs surface approximation rollout.

for large environments it would be better to export extreme low-poly 3ds objects, maybe.

[doriziofilho]

you can play with adaptative degradatio... hit "O"
or you can booster in your vga card... if your card are nvidia chipset can you transforme in a quadro card and use maxtreme driver... you will win more fastest in your view port... some thigs are use box option to view tree for instance...
excuse my bad englis...

[Frances]

hi!

the problem is the high standard tesselation of imported nurbs objects in max.
you can adjust these settings in the nurbs surface approximation rollout.

for large environments it would be better to export extreme low-poly 3ds objects, maybe.

The problem with that is that once you export to a static mesh in .3ds format, it can't be made more detailed. With R2M breps, not only can you adjust tessellation back and forth, but render detail can be made view dependent. So that way, far off things have less tessellation than things close-up. I'm not sure to what extent VRay honors this functionality, but since the question isn't about rendering, it doesn't really matter.

On import, you can set the Viewport Resolution for the imported Breps to coarse. Also make sure that Two-sided Trims is disabled.

What graphics display mode are you using? If you're not using OpenGL, you might want to switch and see if it's faster.

[Erik de Graaf]

This won't be helpfull for you i guess, but i just want to add that the same problem occurs when you link your autocad file to max, viewport operation is very slow and not workable at all, this happens with very simple models. Maybe this is also the case with rhino, did you try to import without keeping the file linked to Rhino ?

Erik

[plastic_]

i think it's the trees...

max has a problem with handling many individual objects. if you attach them all to one mesh things would be much faster. grouping doesn't seem to help unfortunately.

try putting them all into one layer and turn it on & off with the floating layer dialog. layers are a good way to handle high poly scenes.

also the radeon will struggle with wireframes, shaded mode should be faster...a quadro card would handle that scene much better.

[caustic angel]

yes, the trees could be another reason for this problem.

in case of rendering big environments i never would use geometry for plants, but simple bitmaps. they look much more better and have 100 times less geometry.

(plastics treeshop is very cool for that!)


using speedtrees also could be much better.
what kind of trees are you using?

@frances: max don´t seems to handle brep-objects right, also i think better never import nurbs. i often imported geometry from rhino as .iges in max and everytime i´ve got the same problem with viewport-speed, nevermind with setting i made in surface approximation rollout.

edit: p4 2,4ghz 2gb ram

[flipside]

Thanks for the replies!

Problem with brepobjects (=rhino data inside max) is that when set to box view, it is still being displayed as nurbs isocurves.

Indeed maybe an option would be to set the brep to 'mesh' in viewport and then use box mode.

The trees are just simple spheres and cylinders, not more than 100poly each.

Actually what is the difference between openGL, direct3D and heidi??? I mean, when to use what?

Thanks,

wouter

[flipside]

The advantage of powerrhinotomax is so great that I will never go back and use 3ds export from rhino. The brepobject makes a really efficient mesh at rendertime.


edit:

Oh man! I switched the graphics mode, it was on direct3d for some reason. Now it is really fast (openGL), even with all objects unhidden and in normal isocurve view!!! Can't believe I spent a whole week struggling with that file when the solution was so simple...

Now the isocurve view is definately faster than the mesh wireframe view, finally!