Fastest way to load max scene

[pietervanstee]

Hi,

What would be the fastest way to load your scenes?
A while ago I've been working locally on an ssd to ensure quick load times for my projects, but this didn't seem to help very much.
Max would only read at a max of 10-20Mb/s while the ssd (M2) should get speeds of up to 900Mb/s.
At the moment we've switched to a network storage solution because max didn't seem to be able to load any faster so it wouldn't be a disadvantage to load directly from a network location.

My scenes usually contain hundreds of proxies and textures which makes the loading process quite long.
Any advice on how to get your max file to load the fastest way?

Thanks!

[Richard7666]

Are all the scene assets on the SSD? I'm interested in this too, when you have to load a couple of hundred MB of trees and detailed furniture into a scene via proxies/Xrefs it can take awhile. I'd have hoped an SSD would be quicker but sounds like that hasn't been your experience?

[psanitra]

Just get some cheaper NVME drive from samsung, like 1TB 970 EVO for PCIe slot. And your read speed is solved. However, project/render start up/load is not. That highly depends on what kind of scene you work with and how much data have to be processes before it can go to render, and how much can be loaded directly(proxy,vscene), what is multihreaded in these steps and what not. Disk speed from this view, might not be your limiting factor...


At home i run 10Gbit nics in both my workstation and main render slave(my old WS). And data are stored on 2x Samsung 970 evo in raid 0 (read 7000MB/s). That`s absolutely beastly setup, be even so, the way Max processes things, or vray in max on that matter,there is still lot of data processing sequentially,and loaded sequentially too. These things you can only speed up with as fast as possible single CPU core frequency and mem bandwidth. That`s why some overclocked Intel 8 core at 4.5Ghz is much faster or snapier for Max then 32core AMD.

Using network storage location in 90% cases(regular users)is slower then any local disk. Even if you throughput is good(tested in MB/s) the latency is mostly terrible (specially on 1Gbit and NAS solutions like Synology or Qnap). I would strongly advice against working from network attached location/disk.

If you are looking for fastest way to load your scenes for rendering only, for example for animation rendering farm, vray scene + standalone is fastest. The scene is prepared,independent of host app,stored on chosen disk,stripped of any max dependency. For render it does not have to run host app. Max does not even have to be installed on that render node, so you`ll get your bucket running right away after vray loads the vrscene, compiles it and loads the attached assets(textures, proxy).

probably longer answer then you needed, but i guess i was in the writing mood

[pietervanstee]

Hi Psanitra,

Thank you for sharing your setup and knowledge to setup max regarding loading a scene.
Can you please let me know what read speeds you get when loading a new scene? The larger scenes I'm working on lately consist of quite small max files 40-150Mb, just some poly model.
Which is full of proxies, railclone, and forest objects. The scenes contain easily 400+ proxies, as each appartment is detailed, and all the furniture is loaded as proxies.
Each with their textures.
Do you have experience with scenes similar to this? And what kind of reading speeds do you get?

I've been working up till a year ago when I was still working on my own, on a single EVO NVME. The reading speeds I got from that setup wasn't very good (max 30-35Mb/sec).
That's why I switched to our remote storage 1Gb/s. I would be very happy already with a consistent speed around 60-75Mb, but mostly we get speeds between 2-30Mb/s.
Because of my experience with the NVME, which wasn't very much better I assumed that Max just needs time to load assets.
If there is any documentation on this would be very usefull...

Fast loading scenes would be nice, slow loading scenes are ok to live with unless you get a bug which crashes your scene sometimes...
For the future we're looking into the option to add an NVME cache to our nas in combination with 10GbE.

[anthonyh]

One overlooked thing is to make sure you have file compression turned off as that can slow down loading/saving a fair bit, although you`ll lose disk space. Might be less of an issue with a very powerful pc though.

[pietervanstee]

Yes, I know. I have this turned on on some workstations.
The file goes from 40mb w compression to 150 mb uncompressed.
So there isn't very much to uncompress.
Just a lot of vrayproxies with textures to load.

[gandhics]

Which version?
3dsMax will check every single asset path while loading.
If it doesn't find from the defined path, it will go all user path which you defined and try to find.
If there is any missing assets, 3dsMax will wait the response from storage.
If you have IFl files, it check every single bitmap in that list.

Try this in MXS listener.

setIniSetting (getMAXIniFile()) "Performance" "FindMissingMapsOnSceneLoad" "0"

This will make 3dsMax try not to check missing map while loading.
You may restart max after run this.