Material preview Subdiv Cap

[viscorbel]

In the wake of all these dmc sampler threads, I think many users are bumping up their material reflection/refraction subdivs to clean up noise with secondary samples instead of AA.
The result is that it's not uncommon to see materials with 200~500 subdivs.

All this is fine when rendering, but material editor is crawling like a snail, especially if there's a whole bunch of materials with high subdivs in there.
How about a global setting subdiv cap setting for these material previews? For example set cap to 8 subdivs and enjoy fast/noisy mat previews while still getting noiseless renders. Want smoother preview, disable cap or set it higher. Kind of like Corona render has settings to control material preview sampling quality.

It could make the whole material editing process a lot faster/less frustrating.

[vlado]

All this is fine when rendering, but material editor is crawling like a snail, especially if there's a whole bunch of materials with high subdivs in there. How about a global setting subdiv cap setting for these material previews? For example set cap to 8 subdivs and enjoy fast/noisy mat previews while still getting noiseless renders.

Yes, we'll need something like that. We do it in V-Ray for Maya, so I guess it makes sense to have it in 3ds Max too.

Best regards,
Vlado

[MoonDoggie]

I wish the global multiplier for subdivisions was separated like thus:

Global Material Subdivisions: 1.0
Global Light Subdivisions: 1.0

etc. It'd be nice to be able to increase one without the other. Definitely a fix for the mat editor is desired though.

[zeronove]

I was asking for something like that ages ago but, from answers I got, I assumed it was only an issue from my side

[vlado]

Global Material Subdivisions: 1.0
Global Light Subdivisions: 1.0

This was, in fact, in the design document for 3.0, but unfortunately we didn't have time to code it. Hopefully in a service pack...

Best regards,
Vlado