help! huge scene lags with large bitmaps.

[Joelaff]

Check your server load, and check your network usage. See if that is your issue. It is possible it is something else.

I know we have had this display slowdown before, and I don't recall the issue. For your display slowdown you could try this:

Use a Shell material. Set the Baked version of your shell to use the big texture (and make it the version that renders in the Shell settings) Make a simple VRayMtl with one simple Diffuse map for display in the viewport. Set that one to display and the other to render in the Shell Material settings.

Note that the smaller bitmap should be pretty small, as Max is so stupid as to load Bitmap textures even if they are not used in rendering. I think if you use a VRayHDRI node it will only load if it is used in the render. The reason we often use bitmap nodes for the viewport portion of the Shell material is that VRayHDRI does not update well in the viewport with image sequences. So if you are using a sequence it is worth using the shell material with a bitmap node for the display just to get the proper updating. For a still I think you could and should use VRayHDRIs for both.

[Joelaff]

BTW, if you only see your big ground plane texture from one direction towards the horizon then you might try scaling your texture to half or quarter size in the dimension that fades off to the distance. I would be sure to use Bicubic (the softer one) or some other softer algorithm for the scaling to avoid any sharpening that could make things worse.

But this might save you a lot of memory.

[super gnu]

have you read all the issues ive had with vrayhdri? 3 pages of pain. its finally gone away now ive swapped back to the bitmap loader.. as mentioned earlier , its not network related, im pulling the files of a local ssd raid 0 array. ive got 300 materials in this scene, im certainly not going to manually create 300 shell materials just to speed up the viewport issues the hdri loader has, however nice its texture filtering may be. .

[super gnu]

nice trick with the single axis scaling of a bitmap

unfortunately i see the landscape from lots of directions as its for animation.

[Joelaff]

Are you using VRayProxies? They are terribly slow with the vrmesh on a network drive as well. This was why we setup the local assest system. IIRC, the slowdown with larger vrmeshes on a network drive was pretty substantial.

[Joelaff]

Oh, another huge scene tip I learned... Max hates lots of small objects. If you have some assets you know will not change or animate try attaching them all to a single object. We saw some really big speedups on assets with lots of individual objects, like a store shelf that was 1500 objects.

[super gnu]

there are proxies in the scene, but they are almost all trees, and used in forest objects. again all stored locally on the ssd array.. until this gets sent to the farm, its all local on a very fast array.

im currently going through the scene collapsing the crap out of it. however now ive switched back to the bitmap loader the scene is nice and fast anyway.. hopefully collapsing everything might save a bit of ram.

[Joelaff]

have you read all the issues ive had with vrayhdri? 3 pages of pain. its finally gone away now ive swapped back to the bitmap loader.. as mentioned earlier , its not network related, im pulling the files of a local ssd raid 0 array. ive got 300 materials in this scene, im certainly not going to manually create 300 shell materials just to speed up the viewport issues the hdri loader has, however nice its texture filtering may be. .

I see. Would be a pain. I think this was indeed the issue that I had in the past. Going the shell material route solved my issues, but I only had a few huge textures.

*****HEY CHAOS FOLKS:

Would be really nice if VRayHDRI had a setting to control the resolution of the texture fed to Max. This would be very helpful not just for this issue, but in general it could be nice to have some textures at 256 or 512 pixels in the viewport even if they are actually 8k maps.

[super gnu]

seems to me the issue, at least in part, is caused by the hdri loader doing something ( reloading? resampling to lower viewport res?) every time you select it or click on any control in its interface. in fact having my recent experience, it even seems that it might do this for *all* hdris in the scene, every time you click a button in *one* of them. it certainly spends a helluva lot of time doing something.. very often.

[vlado]

What would be even nicer, is for you to get us scenes that reproduce those issues so that we can fix them We don't really have scenes with 300 materials to test with...

Best regards,
Vlado

[glorybound]

I posted about this awhile back, on a large project I was working on. Going from shaded to wireframe, or the other way around, was taking 30-40 seconds. Working with things showing in object color helped and so did using proxies for almost everything. There were a couple scripts that helped. One allowed me to change all items on a layer its own common color and the other one let me show proxies as boxes, if needed.

[super gnu]

Vlado: i can certainly send you a file.. might take a few wetransfers to get it over.. should i send it your address? keep it to yourselves

[vlado]

i can certainly send you a file if you have somewhere i can upload a couple of GB.. keep it to yourselves

Sure, email our support guys at support@chaosgroup.com and they will get you FTP info to upload it.

Best regards,
Vlado

[RobH22]

I know this is an old thread but I'm experiencing massive lags with Max 2021 and Max 2022 with small to medium poly sized files (less than 300k polys) when I use any Substance. It appears the Displacement is just crippling Max. I'm waiting 45-seconds between mouse clicks.