3Ds Max tips for working on highpoly objects

loggie24

Hi. I'v been working on quite a few highpoly objects lately and it's not been pretty. Currently i'm sitting with 2 models that are aprox. 10 mil polys each and i'm getting constant freezes and FPS sits at around 15-20, it's hard to work efficiently. I have a fairly beefy computer as well, 32gigs of DDR4, i7 5920k, GTX 980Ti etc.. Is it simply the softwares limit? It only uses about 8 gigs of my RAM and barely any CPU.

Any tips would be great :awesome:

0xffff

Wireframe is death. Try to separate into smaller meshes and hide anything you're not working on. If you're using subdivision modifiers keep the iterations low on anything you're not working on. 

spacefrog

What Max version, which service pack  ?
Max 2017 has seen a great increase in edit mesh/edit poly performance. But Max 2016 isn't too bad either. It all depends whether it's really the raw poly count that kills your performance or other reasons. Of course you can't expect to get good performance if you use a modifier stack which constantly has to push updated geometry up the stack, causing modifiers to do their recalcs...

Just some random thoughts:

* be sure do disable  backface culling in the object properties
* as mentioned above, if you work on high poly, collapse the stack, or toggle show end result to be  off in the modifier rollout
* work in shaded mode, not realistic mode, maybe even clay mode is faster than shaded mode, plain wireframe mode should be faster too
* be sure to not run a service pack/version with well known bugs ( eg. the memory leaking nitrous bug of 3ds Max 2016 SP2 )
* if you work with texture display enabled in the viewport , take care ( = enable ) texture resolution limits.
   (eg. Procedural texture resolution higher than 512 can seriously hurt performance )

If you still are on Max 2013, or even Max 2012 ( let not even talk about pre-Nitrous versions ), you are on a bit of a sour spot.
Those early nitrous implementations sure miss some essential optimizations

musashidan

Just out of curiosity,  what kind of model are you working on that's 10mill?

yukonwanderer

@spacefrog how's max 2015? vs 2016 and 2017? I'm hesitant to get a newer version than 2015 because there are always bugs but is there a difference in them that make the bugs worth it?

rollin

haha.. welcome to highpoly nightmare. .sorry.. 
So to give you better advice it would help to know what you want to do.

As far as I know there is not the right way. Just the best workaround for your specific task.

musashidan: for example 3d scanns

musashidan

rollin said:

musashidan: for example 3d scanns

For a raw 3d scan at 10mill my first port of call would always be Zbrush, for cleanup and/or retop, zremesh, decimation. Trying to work on a raw mesh at editable poly sub-object level like this is a nightmare and should be avoided at all cost.

rollin

You have to split it into smaller chunks, bool something in or out. Fix textures, merge with another mesh, delete sections... Doing a full retopo if you just got an hour time? 
In a perfect world I would do all this clever stuff but in reality most of the time you just have to come up with a way to get things going.
Anyway.. this would represent one use case.. retopo represents another.. That's why I'm asking for more information.

loggie24

Sup guys. It's a scan as someone already somewhat guessed. It has been through zbrush but i need to keep it highpoly otherwise i loose a lot of the fine details i'm after. Either way, i appreciate a ll the response and will read through it later today. Cheers!

thomasp

i deal with that all the time. create a copy of your scan in zbrush, run decimation master over it hard and use that copy as a proxy for working in max. it's rare you need the proper highres detail all the time anyway. and if you do, consider importing only relevant cutout-sections of your scan into your max scene. also if it comes with massive textures, create lowres versions of these, too.

this speeds up working in zbrush a good deal, too. you can always keep the actual scan separate from your work scene.

spacefrog

yukonwanderer said:

@spacefrog how's max 2015? vs 2016 and 2017? I'm hesitant to get a newer version than 2015 because there are always bugs but is there a difference in them that make the bugs worth it?

I believe it's more or less like 2014 viewport performance wise. But it's a big step above Max 2012 and Max 2013.  In the end , Max 2017 beats them all, and as i heard through the grapevine, a SP2 release might be imminent, which would purge another round of most serious  bugs. On a raw edit poly/edit mesh level you certainly CAN work with 10 Mio poly objects in Max 2017. Operations like slice etc are damn fast. even applying modifierstack based deformations are unbelievable fast. And they fixed some serious performance issues with animations when trackview is open. This leads to faster playback rates in the range of 5x-10x times when deforming , animated mesh nodes  ( like animated, skinned characters ) are in the scene and trackview is open.

Regarding bugs:
Max 2016 SP3 is pretty solid for my tasks, but i seem to remember a UV flipping bug on FBX export some people reported. Don'T know if theres a workaround for that. Max 2017 is even better in my eyes, but needs that second SP ( SP2 )
But rest assured that Max 2015 too has some bugs left in it and certainly will never receive a fix for those.