If I have empty scene - no problem with any material update in SME. It takes less than second to get preview updated.
If I have couple of objects in a scene - update of material which is not assigned to any object takes less than second, if I assign this material, update takes just slightly more time.
But if I have amount of objects as in normal working archviz scene, then update of material preview takes up to 7 second even after some basic changes such as diffuse color change or reflection on/off in material with empty map slots. Not assigned material update takes less than second.
I supposed that it connected with viewport representation of materials, but this behavior doesn’t depend on any viewport settings and shading method, it’s the same in wireframe or different shaded modes. Besides that it doesn’t matter how many object are represented in viewport - it’s the same even if a single object is isolated and I change material assigned to another object.
There is no this problem in Compact ME, but I prefer to work in SME.
I’ve done same kind of tests in Max 2014 - there is no this kind of problem at all.
Actually I purchased Max 2021 not long time ago and worked only with a few projects in it. Today I spent some time inspecting the scenes I 'm working with at the moment and finally found the problem point. It is a group of objects and some problem is hiding probably in their material. I’ve uploaded the max file which contains those objects - multiple piles of books. File name is 1611966917_books-bug.zip
All those books have one multi/sub-object material with 57 very simple sub-materials assigned to them.
The steps to reproduce the issue:
Create Corona material, change something in it - preview updates instantly.
Assign this material to the box or to any other new or old object, change something in this material - Max is hanging for a second, after that material preview updates.
Create 10 copies/instances of those piles of books. Change something in that material - now Max is hanging for 10 seconds, after that material preview updates.
Create a new material, assign it to all those books. Change the material you created before - problem has gone, material preview updates instantly again.
As I mentioned before it doesn’t matter are those books hidden or shown in viewport, are they renderable or not. Viewport settings do not affect this issue.
Before I purchased Max 2021 (finally) I worked on my old Max 2014 and I’m able to make the same test with exactly the same objects - there is no this problem with Max 2014 and never was before.
What monitors are you using and what resolution are they set to?
This maybe sounds like a strange question, but we had some reports of this in the past and it seemed as though it was related to dual-xeon CPUs and 4k monitors..
As I mentioned above I already use single monitor setup
Now I’ve tried to reproduce this issue with latest DB and screen resolution set to 1600x1024, but got the same result.
I see, thank you for the update. I am afraid I was also unable to reproduce this, at this point you might want to test resetting your ENU folder and see if it’s some sort of script/plugin issue. As always keep the old ENU folder to revert back the changes, if that’s not the culprit.
I’ve done more tests and found out that this issue persists with other renderes with their own materials assigned to the box in my scene. Also I have the model of these books with the same material structure but Vray version - it produce the same Max hangings with Vray and other renderes set as current. So it seems that this issue doesn’t connect with Corona at all.
Would like to know what is the reason for this situation, why it doesn’t happen in Max 14 and how to avoid this kind of issues.
2021.3 has some quick fixes for Slate performance which was introduced without info & testing… so you could roll back to 2021.2 and see if it happens there. If not, then the new ‘fix’ in 2021.3 is the culprit - in that case, report to Autodesk.
Could you share the scene with me privately? Only the problematic asset…
Hi Pokoy. Thanks for your interest to this issue.
I found out that it’s easy to reproduce this issue even with boxes. Here I attached the box version of the scene with this problem.
Multi/Sub-object material with 60 sub-materials assigned to the massive of 5000 instanced boxes. Corona material assigned to the unique box. Try to change something in that Corona material and see how much time it will take to get material update complete. On my computer it takes about 6 sec. Max 2014 does this job in 0.5 sec.
Works perfectly here (Max2021.3 + DBv7 + i9-9900K), update is almost instant, even when having IR running and having rendering enabled in SME + preview window + the MS material dropped into the SME view.
Downloaded the file and got the same result as frood, instant change of the corona mat of the single box
using max 2021.3 corona 6.1 win 10 ryzen 3950
The ones that make my max cry are the composite materials, those are SLOW
