Max 2018, Vray 3.6, Slate Editor

[o-v]

Hello guys.
I have here a very annoying issue with slate editor. My scene is rather complex one, 20 high res cars with complex shaders (car fair visualisation) + all the shiny and refractive stuff around, a bit of foliage and of course a ton, like A TON of bitmap textures.

Trying to edit the shaders in the slate editor is a royal pain in the a.... The unbearable waste of time watching the "render queue" in the right bottom corner working through the shaders is ridiculous. Well, the problem is - the slate editor and max freezes during that time. The bigger problem is: it happens even having one shader (ok a complex one, with >20 nodes) in the view. ticking off the shader rendering seem to ease the pain. The slate editor is da... sluggish in respect to the classic one though.

My system is old, not weak though. win7, i7 990x, geforce 960 gtx, 50GIG ram, ssd samsung 850. RAM load during editing is like 16 - 20 GIG. Plenty of free space left. Rendering is a whole different story - RAM is filled in seconds to 99%, but the rendering is fast, 20 min for HD Resolution. A year ago? I could watch a movie...

The more odd thing is - having like one model of a car with all the shaders in the scene only and editing (preparing xRef object e.g.) makes no big issues even with all the car shaders (a car can have up to 100 different shaders) in the slate view.

Btw. no issues with the classic editor. Can edit any shader in the huge scene without any lag or freezing.

Does anyone of you have a problem with the slate editor performance in vray + max 2018 combo?

One more thing: I had no big probs with the slate editor doing the same job in max 2016 with the same system, same renderer, but the 3d view performance... oh boy. Max 2018 is much more superior in this case.

Thx a heap for any hints or input in advance.

[svetlozar.draganov]

Does the same thing happen with other render engines as well?
We have to somehow identify if the slowdown is cased by 3dsMax or V-Ray.

[o-v]

As all my assets are shaded in vray - and there are many - I had no reason to test it with e.g. arnold (I avoided it like the devil the holy water actually). It's really hard to say, if its vray. I would not bet on that. Its something in between I guess. Something is permanently filling up the memory every time the content of the slate editor is changed. An indication could be - after loading the scene into max - 16 GIG of memory are used. Launching the slate editor more RAM is used - as expected. Closing the slate editor, the RAM is not going to be less used. That's not so logical. It feels like you make a change to a single node, the whole bunch is processed in the background and so the stall. Example adding a fallof curve instead of build in fresnel to the reflections of one shader and every shader is rendered in the background like it wouldn't before. Turning the rendering in the slate editor off helps a lot, makes the workflow a little bit more tedious and based on a guess though.

doing a test render - my RAM is full up to 80%. After finishing the rendering it gets empty a little but never reaches the initial state. Restarting max empties RAM. So the chance vray not being the culprit is rather high. or not? I don't know.

simple test would be: get an evermotion car collection nr. 1 (even vray, old shaders though) - load it all into a scene, make a copy of each, add a tree or two (evermotion is fine) and start to tweak the shaders. You sould end up with around 20 mil polygons in the scene. Max 2018 can handle that amount very good. I can actually work with all models visible in the viewport, what I could not do with max 2016. not in the wildest dream.

Now start replacing the shellac with vray car paint and make each copy different color. if there's no issue at your side, than pls tell me what kind of a machine you're using. Maybe it's really my old donkey.