3DSmax animation lag in viewport?

capone

I have a pretty good PC, has 10GB ram etc Intel Core i7 2.80GHz 3.36GHz

In max I have 3 viewport layout. 2 are wireframe and 1 camera view in standard shading. when I play a door animation (simple single motion)it lags in the camera issue. Shouldn't it be able to show smooth animation? or is this normal?

hyrumark

I've noticed that a lot of things can cause this.

-Try playing the animation with the material editor open.
-Do you have aero enabled or turned off?
-Disable antialiasing in preferences>viewports tab>configure driver

Strangely, I don't get lag with aero enabled. But if material editor is open with aero enabled then I get lag.

Conversely, with aero turned off I get lag UNLESS I leave the material editor open, then the lag goes away.

But if I turn AA off in driver settings, then all is good. This is all with Win7 and 3ds Max 2011.

Archanex

hydrumark- What is aero? And where do I turn it off?

Max has always been slow when it comes to animation playback... here are a couple of tricks I've found to improve performance over the years..

1. make sure all views are set to flat shaded, for whatever reason showing edged faces makes playback considerably slower

2. close the curve editor - sadly, this is a big one!

3. hit Shift+H to hide helper objects, and Shift+S to hide spline shapes, this can also help a bit

This should help, but you're still not going to get playback speeds as fast as maya I'm afraid

capone

Don't know where aero is either but I found a solution that worked for me. It was simply turning off textures in the viewport configure menu and also turning edge selection off.

Pola

Aero is eye candy, it gives your windows/taskbar transparency, and transitions etc. It's for windows vista/7(/8?). To turn it off just go into your appearance settings in control panel and choose a basic theme. If you're unable to find it a quick google on "disable aero" should give you step by step instructions

JamesWild

I think you'll find the actual problem with Aero is that it enforces vsync, and a lot of parts of 3DS Max were never written to handle this, so each window open with some kind of realtime graphics in it divides the framerate further.

framerate = refresh / windows
20fps = 60Hz / 3 windows

I never tried this but it's possible the bug exists for quad viewports too and switching to one may help mitigate it.

$3675. Have they really still not fixed this since I saw it in 2010?



The only two other programs I know of that don't handle enforced vsync well today are Word 2003 (when drawing images) and a version of Anvil Studio from 2002. For reference.

poopipe

deselect anything with keys on, hide bones, close material editor and track view windows, turn off AO and disable edged faces

if that doesn't work then something is broken.

deselecting things should make the most difference cos when something is selected its constantly monitoring it's tracks

Sage

max has always had the same lag since version 2.5... same exact thing same exact time, regardless of polycounts.... it's awesome for modeling though....

monster

If you are using Max 2013 set the viewport to Shaded Materials With Maps. If you use Realistic Materials it will lag the viewport.

reptilebeats

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reptilebeats

noo, i just wrote a load but it got deleted because im new and had to re login again.

anyway in short to what i just wrote, use layers to manage your animations, so for example in my scene i have a scwarry pirate grabbing a knife from a table. so i put the knife, table and biped into a new layer and maybe the mesh if im lucky. and then hide the other layers with all the junk in it i dont really need for animating.

its important to note that it will not work just by hiding objects in the scene they must be hidden using layers (go layers and hit hide) as 3ds max im guessing uses different resources to hide objects in the scene and using layers to hide them.

if any of that made sense then i hope it helped

Mark Dygert

It also seems to help if you close the curve editor and keep your modifier stack as short as possible. I've also seem a slight increase in speed if the base of the skinned object is converted to editable mesh instead of editable poly. I think that has to do with there being less tools in editable mesh, less things that you could possibly do to it and a smaller footprint? Not really sure but it seems to help.

Also is you have a lot of stuff skin wrapped convert it to skin.

reptilebeats

fair point, didn't think of that, dang it ive already started to do my Phonemes, but its a bit laggy due to the high poly count of my character. might redo it again as the timings a bit off anyway.

TheDoorIs

Sorry to resurrect a post, but I've been having this issue and been searching all over. I have everything on layers and only show what I need.

I found where all of the slow-down came from though. Flex modifiers were DESTROYING my playback speed. I toggled them off and can actually preview things now. This may be common knowledge, but hopefully it helps someone in a similar situation.

Coffeehouse

I just found this thread in search of help. The last answer really helped me. I want to add that in my case it was not the flex modifier but the cloth modifier that killed the playback speed.

1amrobot

Hey, first of all, thanks to all y'all. My issue, was the Spring Controller i assigned for 2 of my bones, and it was destroying my viewport playback speed. So, now my playback speed is fine.