3dsMax 2018.2 - New spline tools and 3dsMax batch + A lot of fixes.

[anthonyh]

I can`t(won`t) use it until the `click twice` issue is fixed, it`s basic interface stuff. Until then I`m skipping 2018, I won`t have the luxury when 2019 comes out as you can only use 3 versions back ?

[kosso_olli]

All in all though, big scenes that are poorly optimized should be more responsive now.

Might be a little off-topic, but is there a guide that shows what an optimized big scene should look like in 3dsMax? That tells what to look for when using scenes with thousands of objects?

[gandhics]

Might be a little off-topic, but is there a guide that shows what an optimized big scene should look like in 3dsMax? That tells what to look for when using scenes with thousands of objects?

Most 3D DCC prefer a few high poly than a lot of objects
It is because each object carries certain overhead regardless of poly count.

But, generally, 3dsMax 2017+ should not have any problem with 100mil/10+thousands of static objects.
Under the hoof, Nitrous consolidate them all as one mesh.

Ont thing, if you have too much of hierarchy going, 3dsMax has to calculate one by one from the top since lower hierarchy depends on higher hierarchy.

[Deflaminis]

Hello Olli. Some other members of the Max support team started a doc recently, but I haven't had a chance to add my info to it yet. It probably needs to be broken into two parts, 1 for rendering and 1 for scene/viewport management. Maybe what we need is a whole thread about scene optimization. Whether it's on the area or here, this is a good topic that needs a deeper analysis and discussion. https://knowledge.autodesk.com/suppo...ax-scenes.html

The following is my observations and opinions and should not be construed as an official Autodesk stance on anything. At the end of the day I'm simply a tech support person, I am not 'the architect', so to speak. Also, I have to type this hastily because I have a job to do. I can chime in more after hours.

Scene management is the big issue for any 3D software. Trying to build scenes as big as Max can handle in some other packages will simply not work. But just because you can stuff Max full of objects doesn't mean it's a good practice. Somewhere along the road in the past 10 years as artists in the industry we sort of lost the art of scene optimization and management. I think it's because of the pressure put on western studios by outsourcing. The scene TD was the first to go in many small and medium studios and I have seen countless times studios expecting recent grads to know how to manage huge projects. In some studios artists are simply a commodity, hired on short term contracts to fulfill big demands. As such they don't get the training they likely need, especially right out of school. But I digress...

Xforms/transform history, modifier stacks, etc. can make each scene very unique to optimize. You can certainly use 32,000 objects if you want, but is it necessary? I would say that it is not for most cases. It takes more time to attach things or optimize things and that's not really 'fun' work either. Those shelves you have that are broken into 500 parts could easily be 5 parts. That is 495 fewer transforms to deal with and keep track of. Each Edit Poly or Edit Mesh keeps another copy of your mesh inside of it, doubling up the resource needs.

I spent the bulk of my career doing commercials, games, and retail viz. Nothing is quite like retail viz. When you have to fill an entire store with product and merchandise, you simply *must* learn how to optimize scenes. I've done flythroughs that required me to attach all my objects together to render at all simply because I was loading 10,000 unique textures as well. (even with proxies, rendered frame window off, etc it's simply a pita to work with scenes that big...) It's always a dance between performance and time. Again, we should start a thread about specifically optimization. It will have a lot of info in it.

Best,
AJ

[ALEX_SPYROPOULOS]

I used 2018 for my last two projects , and it is quite stable (i had terrible problems with 2017) , I got a few crashes here and there but i got the projects out of the way without serious issues, Still i am not 100% convinced, I haven't downloaded the 18.2 though yet. It is definitely a very good release in comparison with 2017. But 2016 with all SPs was one of the best.

[Undersky]

I work in arch-viz and had a scene with a rather large neighbourhood with lots and lots of objects in groups. In 2018 I had to wait about 1 - 1,5 seconds until the viewport responded when I was trying to pan or rotate (but once those seconds had passed, I had no problem navigating... It just happened every time I tried starting navigating again). I installed 2018.2 over the weekend and now the viewport response is instant! Huge success!

[Oleg_Budeanu]

I can`t(won`t) use it until the `click twice` issue is fixed, it`s basic interface stuff. Until then I`m skipping 2018, I won`t have the luxury when 2019 comes out as you can only use 3 versions back ?

Same here. Can't work at all, until these 2 bugs are not fixed : this and this
But yeah, we needed splines more than anything else.