So with the 19.1. daily I’m experiencing weird and completely random slowdowns when rendering a complex scene. Sometimes the render starts instantly, other times “Parsing the scene…” takes a minute or more, and sometimes “Building acc. structure…” takes a minute or two.
All of this happens without changes in the scene, ie. I press render and cancel a few times in a row, and each time the scene preparation behaves differently.
Scratch the “complex scenes” part. I just uploaded a small scene with three crappy trees with the link you gave me (1422293881_preparationslow.zip) . Same thing happens approx. 1 out of 10 times. Also the mat editor is insanely slow on in all my scenes, this one included.
Running Max 2015 on dual Xeons on a Supermicro MBO with 48 GB ram, SSDs, the works. As for plugins, besides Corona, we also have Vray 3 (SP1), ForestPack, RailClone.
I uninstalled and reinstalled service pack 3 for 3dsmax 2015, and it seems both problems are gone. Seems it was Max’s fault somehow. I did have SP3 installed before (no clue if the installation could have gone wrong somehow) but Max works in mysterious ways… :-/
Hope you haven’t spent too much time on it, or any for that matter.