I come across this time after time. I have something in my scene that I select and MAX just shows me the spinning wheel forever. it might finally work, but I usually kill MAX out of frustration, after 10 - 15 minutes. Any way around this? Does it happen to you guys? I can spend 1/4 of my day trying to delete something.
usually this type of thing happens in massive unoptimised scenes with loads of objects…
Yep, basically described all my scenes 
get in the habit of optimising as you go. collapsing can always be undone, older versions can be loaded to get back collapsed stuff, elements can be detached..
your working life will thank you infinitely.
I get that a lot too and I think super gnu is right, I just found out the other day about the “ProOptimizer” modifier from another thread and have been trying it and its been working fantastic taking scenes that are 1.7GB down to 600mb!! and still look great 
now Im playing with the batch optimizer to see if I can use that as well on older scenes.
-dave
I’ll have to do some testing.
i rarely go as far as using pro-optimiser etc. only on really big scenes that need trimming for rendering.
as discussed a million times before.. (often with Bobby max much prefers a few heavy objects as opposed to thousands of individual ones. i rarely have more than 20-50 objects in my scene.. i prefer to attach rather than have instances of simple objects.
obviously if its 100,000 polys each, dont attach 50 instances together.. proxy em, or spit out into an xref.
but, for a typical building, you could attach by material, for metalwork , glass etc.
i usually have the walls as a single object.. floors etc another. windows and doors another. its really painless to window select a few elements from a collapsed object and detatch if you need to.. and if its problematic/fiddly, load an earlier version.
you get in the habit of knowing what is suitable for instancing or attaching.
if you do use a lot of purchased models though, pro-optimiser etc might come in handy.. 90% of my stuff is custom built for each project, so i dont often end up with 100 copies of a 10,000,000 poly lamp with 10k textures screwing up my scene.
Now that I think about it, I do a lot of optimizing. I do join all my materials together, however, I don’t mess with things I purchase. I should keep that scene count up on the screen.
And I do use a few scripts to audit my scene, which always reveals some gremlins.
I have been working on massive scene myself lately alot, what i do is i try to do as much as i can in the model and somewhere near the end i just start to group and xref stuff out into other files so i will split it up into 4 or 5 parts sometimes which i find helps a whole lot
I got hung again, so out of a hunch, I termantaed that runtimebroker.exe and it woke MAX up.
whats “runtimebroker.exe”?
Yep Bobby,
I read a lot of your complaint about max freezing, and it’s all due to your way of working.
Once you bring in a model, collapse it into a single mesh, there are script to do that, and once you have it and you need it more than once, convert it to proxy. If you need it more than twice, use forest pack to place the or scatter them or railclone.
Once a heavy bld is done, save it to a file and proxy it as well, even if you use it once in your master file.
Your master file should only contain the cams and lights and RP passes, that’s all. All the rest has to be xrefed like follow (each * is a seperate xref) :
* bld (each bld has it’s own xref)
* site
* landscaping (could be done in the site file)
* furniture
* ppl
* surrounds
Go in each of the xref and call the other that you need as reference by using the overlay checkbox so they won’t be loaded twice in you master.
Once you have a optimised workflow as this, trust me, everything will roll
Also, take the habit to disable show textures in viewport and keep your texture size viewport low as well (128), only show the texture and push the ress when you are really mapping some textures and disable them asap
I do disable texture
I dunno I have gigantic scenes and never have an issue. On the other hand a colleague of mine’s pc just hangs constantly. There’s more to it than the scene in max IMO…
All the xrefing, although might work, seems to be a work around. There seems to be no rhyme or reason for the circle of doom. Picking a random element seems to put the software into a tailspin, for no apparent reason.
Sometimes running the garbage collection command in the listener window helps too “gc()”
Unfortunately in my case proxies I dont think will work for me as I have far too many moving parts in my scenes for example building an entire oil drilling rig site and animating the entire operation on the surface and below as well…
I have tried the garbage collection script, but it doesn’t seem to help.
I thought you guys photoshopped everything ^^
It is a Windows 10 thing that manages apps, however, there is a serious memory leak. I have dialog boxes not closing and killing the Runtimebroker solves that.