Limit to the Number of Excluded Objects?

[Joelaff]

When I try to add 500 objects to the exclusion list Max basically hangs. I gave it like 5-10 minutes on a Zen 3 threadripper pro , which is beyond my patience.

Obviously Include is likely easier, but I just wondered if there was a limit, or if the algorithm for adding a bunch of objects at once just has some Big O(n!) aspect to it

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Oh, I think I know why this happens. Let me reproduce it here and will ping you...

[Joelaff]

OK. Thanks. I ended up deleting a bunch of crap and just making a separate SIM scene (which is probably the better way to do it anyway). But if there is a way to add a bunch of objects to exclude that would be cool.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Dang, it's not looking very optimistic - seems like our code does not get called that much, and adding 512 cubes takes 1 minute on my machine and Max 2023 no matter if I try to plug them via the Select From Scene dialog into the Interaction list, or into a Source, or even in the V-Ray Distance Texture (did it as a sanity check). I also tried to pick them in Chaos Scatter and it took 2 minutes :O So it could very well be something on the Autodesk side.

If you find any 3ds Max node that can populate a list faster than this, please ping me and I really mean it - it would help at least knowing it's possible to make it faster.

[Joelaff]

Wow. I wonder if you could hide the list while you update it? Or destroy it and create a new list with all the objects as the initial value or something. Max does a lot of things ridiculously slowly.

Thanks for looking into it. I wonder if 2023 is faster than 2021. Time to upgrade soon.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

A thousand years later, I am back on this and thank you for the suggestion! Quite possibly it was a GUI thing, probably the list box tried redrawing and updating all the items after every new addition, which made it this slow.

I implemented the 3ds Max node picking manually and it seems to work correctly, and also takes a second. However, from time to time people think it's impossible to add more than one item at a time and they don't know about the Add button + Select From Scene list. So ultimately I think I will add a new button that pops up the list dialog immediately and is meant for adding many items. Gotta do this for the Sources and other nodes that use list boxes in 3ds Max as well. Hope it would be in the nightlies in the next couple of days - will ping you

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Yess, it's going to make it in tomorrow's nightlies!

[Joelaff]

Awesome. Thanks for the update.

I’m not sure how Max still has so many programming 101 type inefficiencies in it. But we do get updated button icons every version to confuse us and keep us on our toes.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Haha, yeah, sadly they are not as colorful as they used to be

[Joelaff]

Personally, I prefer the LightWave/Soft Image approach of all text buttons, no icons that you can’t tell what they are, especially since they change every year.