Hi guys, I’m wondering if anyone can advise on the handling of large cad data exports?
I have an fbx of a car which is 700mb ‘full car, interior + wheels + body’
This file is incredibly slow, max becomes unresponsive/ unworkable,
If i take the body on its own the fbx is 200mb,
This works fine, I can tumble around etc quite comfortably, even render with rt, but i really need the whole car in the scene to work quickly
My system is a dual proccessor quad core xeon, 24mb ram, nvidia gtx 780 3gb graphics card,
Are there any tweaks i can make to max? I’ve tried switching to OpenGL legacy mode but still very slow if not worse,
Does this sound like a more powerful machine is required, if so how can i pin point which components are causing the bottleneck?
My initial thoughts are the graphics card, what improvements would a good Quadro card give?
This is something I’d like to know as well as we have similar issues, not unresponsive, but slow and tedious if the full car is visible.The files are around 700mb+ fbx, 25,000+ objects, only 4mil+ tris though. I’m running a single 6 core, 64Gb ram, Quadro 4000.
I find that Max has serious problems with large amounts of objects. 25,000+ objects is way too much. Most cars we are getting from the suppliers have up to 7000 objects, around 4000 of these objects are useless helpers I don’t need anyway. I group the parts into larger elements like headlights, wheels, brakes, grille etc. Only a few dozen helper objects afterwards, around 3-4000 car parts in total, interior+exterior. Polycount around 24million, running at about 12fps on a Geforce GTX Titan. Never used a Quadro because they are too expensive and the gaming cards are faster in RT.
For RT it is best do export the groups as proxies, so that the response time when navigating the scene is lowered.
I agree, 25,000 is a crazy amount. Around 10k of that will be geometry, the other 15k are helper objects which we have to keep as that’s how the assets are tracked. We mostly work on configurators and each finish is a unique piece of geo rather than have 1 set of geo and have a shader change.
I can see no benefit in doing it this way. Why is that? If it is required by the client, you have no other choice, I know. But Max will always be slow with these large amounts of objects, especially helpers. Instinct has written something similar in this thread over here: http://forums.chaosgroup.com/showthread.php?84597-Porsche-911&p=668643#post668643
Also, I am afraid that no existing software package out there could handle this.
Are xref’s an option for you?
It’s a client thing…each piece has it’s own product code that needs to be tracked. We’re working on things being more streamlined, but it’s interesting seeing we’re not the only ones struggling with large amounts of objects.
Ok so i seem to be dealing with similar data lots of helpers/null’s within ‘helpers/null’s’ within ‘helpers/null’s’ and so on,
Now its difficult to collapse with data, and remove the helpers, as it ruins the clients object tree, so if anything changed it could become a nightmare,
Although i would be very interested in what others are doing regards to simplifying scenes if the helpers are causing the slow down,
My fbx is 700mb but saved max file 2.8gb,
Nope its for a still, its how it was delivered from the client, not sure if its how the cad program exports,
What would the easiest way to simplify this be?
hmm well for a still there are a few things you can do - kill all the nulls in the scene, should be painless. Also you can attach my material, then export to vray proxy. That will surely make the scene fast.
Those steps can be coded and repeated each time you get an update. Unless they expect that scene back from you in the same form? then its kinda a problem
I was thinking of killing all the nulls, but would like to keep some kind of organisation by say keeping the top null, also there are various options for bumpers, different models etc, so flattening the scene entirely would make it extremely difficult to turn off parts i don’t need,
Would it be a manual process of me going through each part and flattening things down?
Or are there any quick ways? Unfortunately I don’t have the luxury of knowing how to code,
Nope i don’t have to return the scene just a render, so i can technically do what i like with it,
Mainly trying to keep things organised for my own reasons,
What I usually do on complex scenes is - a bit of work now can be a lot of time saving later. So I would clean up the scene best I could, if you need to keep parts of structure, there is no way to automate that. But I would setup a main scene where those parts can be easily assigned to layers and turned on/off that way rather then using nulls or hiding them.
Attaching by material means that you can combine parts of the same group into single mesh. Max generally likes less single meshes even if they are complex. You can have a scene with a million of cubes it will be slower then having them attached into one.
So lets say you have interior where you have seats made out of leather, well you can select everything that has leather in the interior and attach it into single mesh preserving that material. Usually you don’t have as many materials as you have objects so that’s the point of optimizing.
I think I might have an idea where ali’s model is coming from… Is it that company from Munich, that has it’s own “realtime” software?
I get data from them every week, and it is a pile of crap. Every part of geometry is child of a least 15 Helpers/Nulls. See attached screens. And the parts don’t share these helpers, every part has it’s own set of them!
I don’t see the reason for that, but the parts are arranged into groups and nealy all of the helpers have names like “ANIM_ROT”, ANIM_SCA", “ANI_TRANS”. I can’t understandwhy you need seperate helpers for all the transformations, for EVERY part. I mean, while working at Mackevision I learned how to set up datasets for creating configurators and such, but it was a completely different approach that worked very well in Max.
What I do nowadays is rearrange the parts into logical groups like headlights, seats etc. and delete all the unneccesary helpers. The scene is way more responive afterwards, but you are destroying the “logic” behind the clients scene.
Our data is very similar it seems but different manufacturer, not sure were it came from as it was delivered to us from the manufacturers creative department,
How are you getting this stuff working in max?
Going through manually and moving /deleting things seems very time consuming! And soul destroying lol
Our object tree, this is to get to one part its ridiculous,
I am looking at around 5000 meshes, and 20000 objects according to the summary window,
Now I realise this is a lot, but does anyone have any experience with dealing with a similar dataset, hardware wise ideally without editing the object tree,
I think you can be fairly sure that has come from RTT, because the CSB files that are mentioned in some of the helpers are the native file format for their Deltagen software.
It’s not just the German manufacturers that use them - From my experience, Jaguar, Land Rover and Toyota all do, and I’m sure there are plenty of others.
Anyway, I tend to deal with it by rebuilding the structure as layers in Max and getting rid of all the helpers. Takes a little while, but makes it easier to cope if they send you any new parts.
That is what I do, too. It takes some time to clean up the scene, but in my opinion it is worth it. Just so much nicer to have a scene that is way more responsive. Usually I end up with a scene consisting of around 20 different layers for exterior shots. For interiors, it is way more of course.
