Max7.0 will be released at this Siggarph?

[DP]

heavy tipped rumour from our dealer....Max 7 to include CS.

he also said they are staying tight lipped about 7...i dont know if that confirms its existance in a fuzzy logic kind of way...?

[Long John]

As discreet now "owns" the company who produced CS it´s more then likely.

[f97ao]

I got quiet upset when they released max6.

I think it's madness that they don't handle objects faster than they do. Put on meshsmooth on an editable polygon and no matter how fast a computer you have it will be slow even with very low poly objects. That is an amazing lot slower than it could be. There are many many ways to make big objects faster, and also display faster of many different objects, but for some reason this is nothing they work on. I have given detailed descriptions on different ways to solve the problems with a slow meshsmooth etc, but well I doubt they will ever listen.

One problem with the meshsmooth is that it updates the whole mesh, even though it only needs to update 10 faces, it just has to do a calculation for say 40000 faces. There are also some terrible things going on when you have a large object, for some reason it also has to update everything, even if only one face is moving.

I wrote a scrip for this that speed up modeling with 10-"100" times. But since the internal algoritms of meshsmooth are loocked away a script can never nearly as fast or as efficient.

Am I'm the only one that really enjoys working with many many polygons on complex scenes?

Sometimes it seems like people don't care too much. But then again I got a mail from someone working on the new Vietnam games with similar graphics as Doom3. They had been killing themselves trying to figure out how to model 5 million polygon characters smoothly. And, hmm just by using my simple script it was far faster than bying new hardware for very large sums of money.

I think Vray is a very clear example of how a program should evolve. The Vray team amaze me all the time with new ideas that realy speed up their programs. A little to often it seems like 3dsmax in theory can handle the job, but in reality it uses the most silly unoptimized code to get the job done.

Oh, well I will stop rambeling, but I realy, realy hope they spent some time optimizing geometry performance.

/Andreas

[Robert]

You script sound interesting why don't you post it?

But you are right, Max Performance is not what it should be. And Discreet seams to be very lazy on improving it, instead they give us a plugin every new Version.. Well, who needs MentalRay at all?
I remember being real frustrated with poly modelling in Max some weeks ago I tried Maya. Well, the performance is better, but the rest... forget it! Max has far better modelling Tools then any other software on the market. There are tricks to avoid slownes like isolation tool, groups etc. You can live with Max, but it would be nice if someone would improve it. My personal meaning of course.

So what's up with your script?

regards,

robert

[f97ao]

Of course I can post it. Actually I have posted it on discreet boards 2 times, but didn't get that much response. The main problem with the script is that I did it for myself so it doesn't have that much error checking. Meaning if you try to use it on say nurbs, the script will stop working. Also if you work with many different objects at once bad things can happen. But if you use it correctly it works 98% of the time.

It is very, handi if you work with big objects, for example if you work on a nose on a face you can use iterations=3 and still get completely smooth framrates. the trick is that i split up the objects while you are working on it, so you are actually only working on the nose even though it looks like you are working with the whole head.

Bear with me a while, I just had a hard disk crash with my main computer, I'm using the laptop here, then I will post it and documentations. If you haven't heard from me in a while bug me on my email at f97ao@efd.lth.se

I even considered making a commercial (cheap) application of it, there are some other things that could really make the script very useful. I experimented with "layers" on big objects, meaning you could very fast jump between areas like the nose, the ear etc, it would automatically adjust the level of detail for the different areas and even hide geometry that you weren't working on.

Do you guys think anyone would pay a few pennies if i sat down and worked out a big and more feature full version? And what do you think would be a fair price?

/Andreas

[Long John]

how much faster is your script then the "edit mesh modifier" on top of the editable poly/meshsmooth stack trick?

[stefan]

Currently there are two things that keeps max subD´s from being fast:

1.) Unoptimized code in meshsmooth (it updates the whole mesh, no caching)
2.) A bug in the display driver related to poly´s (the output of the MeshSmooth mod is always poly´s) that results in heavy redundancies when the geo is drawn on the screen. This is the situation since Max4. have a look at the max4 buglist. They removed it from the list with later releases but actually never fixed it. SubD´s used to be quite quite fast in Max3.

The first problems bottleneck is the cpu, the second one´s the graphics card.

They need to fix both in order to get it really up to speed.
The Select mesh mod on top of the mesh smooted object only reduces the 2nd problem, not the first one.

For the fastest subD´s (and graphics display in general) money can buy take a closer look at XSI. It performs approx. 10 times better than Max, end 5 times better than Maya. Hell, I can throw around a 1mio poly scene on my old GForce2MX like nothing in XSI.

Stefan

[gustojunk]

interesting topic, I JUST posted aquestion about this in CGtalk since I'm new at modeling with SubDs and I'm just scratching my head why on earth is so slooow!

This is what I posted there:
http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php...77#post1428077

Can somebody please explain a bit more in detail the "edit mesh modifier' trick? Do I just put tha modifier on top and that's it? But do I keep editing geometry from the editable poy modifier below?

Thanks

[Janus Rölder]

Thats it gustojunk.

[f97ao]

Long John. It's way faster than to have an edit mesh modifier on top of it. Actually the script uses this trick to speed up screen redraw when you move it around. However, the modifier is mainly used to speedup working with the faces and vertexes/edges on an large object. For example try to work on a 100000 polygon object with 2-3 iterations of meshsmooth and you will die. my simple script fixes this by automatically cutting out the area you are working on invisible, and then when you are finished it cuts it back.

It's very correct what Stefan says. The caching is terrible with meshsmooth since there is well no caching. :P Also in max5 the screen redraw was actually faster when you begun spinning the polygon object around in DirectX. I think it managed to cache the object actually. I got so upset when not even this lame speedup thingy stopped working in max6 so I haven't actually used the program much. It was hmm the final straw for me. I decided to wait working with 3d untill the software and computers are more suitable for making the work more fun and less pain.

I haven't tried XSI, glad to hear that it's so fast with polys. I think i will give it a try. Is it "good" otherwise?

/Andreas

[f97ao]

Also, there is one problem with the editable_mesh "trick". It will slow down your modeling, since it has to apply the modifier on top of your poly everytime you move around anything. Thus my scripty removes the editable_mesh modifier everytime you move anything. It speeds it up with about 2 times.
/Phoibos

[Chinwagon]

What about just using a turn to mesh modifier?
:¬)

[f97ao]

Jupp, that is the one I meant. Like I tried to explain, the turn_to_mesh modifier slows down modeling so it's quiet a bit slower. The second problem is that this doesn't help anything with meshsmooth and speeding up the also very slow editable_mesh object. The editable mesh object is fast for rotating, but it's very slow for manipulating if the object is big.

Create and object with say 1000 faces, move around the faces, then create an object with say 500000 faces, and I'm sure you will see it's not so fast to move around vertexes etc.

/Andreas

[f97ao]

I just wanted to say that I'm really trying to recover the PolySpeed script from my ruined harddrive. I turned out my backups weren't so great, but I still think I will be able to find a working version with some work.
/Andreas

[f97ao]

Ok. I have finally managed to recover the script from my broken harddrive, it took several _days_ of work to get most of my files back.

If you guys are still interested in the PolySpeed script please write your mail adress and I will send it to you.

I haven't used it for 6 month, but I tried it fast in max6 and it worked good then at least.

/Andreas