[3DSMAX] Slow Material slate editor (5-10+ seconds of unresponsive max)

OccultMonk

With each change to a material there is a significant pause sometimes 10 sec. Even changing a color is slow. The scene has many objects and hiding them improves performance a bit, but it still lags a lot. There are no real complex shaders and no textures in the scene. I use Vray. In an empty /simple scene there are no problems. 

I have tested for hours and this is the problem:

- Scene: Polycount: 3000 objects - 14M polygons

- Viewport: Standard + Default Shafing (Makes no difference)

- Computer: 8 (real) cores intel processor 4Ghz + 980TI Gpu - 64GB ram (2X 4K Screens)

- Viewport performance: 100 fps+ (Great no lag what-so-ever!)

- 3dsmax 2017 SP3 Windows 10 

 

PROBLEM

- The problem only occurs when the Slate material editor is open.

- Even changing the color causes 5+ sec of lag (max unresponsive)

- The interface of the material slate editor itself has no performance problems

   dragging nodes across the screen is not especially slow

- Using the Compact Material editor does not cause problems/lag/slowdown at all.

- Only materials that are used in the viewport cause lag.

   So editing a material that is not linked to the scene is fast even in the slate material editor.

- It makes no difference if I turn off material previews, or use an other render engine.

- It makes no difference if I use Vray materials or standard materials.

- The problems are the same in an other (test) scene with the same number of objects and topology.

- Viewport performance is great 100fps and fluid.

EliasWick

Hey, I can confirm on my end that I experience something similar, but not as intensive. (I have similar specs and the same version of Max as you do). I haven't really checked on a heavy scene yet. But I have a small lag whenever I open the Slate Material Editor. The 1 - 1,5 second lag is not enough to bother me, but if it would increase to 10 seconds, I would be rather mad. Maybe it has to do with the latest version of Max?

Some things I would try:

* Have you tried opening a scene created with a previous version of Max?
* Reduce some of the performance hitting settings. For example, anti aliasing in viewport, texture resolution in viewport and such.
* Try changing the Viewport Engine under the Customize window. I believe you run the Nitrous Drivers Direct X 11. Try the older ones and see what happens.

Good luck and hopefully you sort it out.

musashidan

 I've just tested it on 2017.1 and I'm getting instant feedback in the viewport. I have 2600 objects with turbosmooth, all sharing the material. Slate is instantly responsive to open/use/edit mats/etc.

My computer is not as good as yours: i7 3930K, pretty shitty old 660gpu - 32G Ram.

However, I'm on a rock solid Win 7 SP2. Been using it for as long as I can remember with updates disabled just as long.

OccultMonk

Thanks for the answers, I forgot about this thread :-) 

I believe my slowdown was caused by many objects with multiple UVW modifiers and turbo smooth. Once I removed or collapsed the UVW Unwrap modifiers Material Slate Editor became fast again. The strange thing is that the Basic Material Editor kept working. So when I changed the diffuse color, it reacted fast, but when I changed the color in the material slate editor it lagged with 10 seconds.

musashidan

Glad you figured it out. I'm a bit old-school in that I still use the compact MatEd. Maybe some day I'll make the leap to slate.

OccultMonk

I really like the node based workflow. It's easy to lose track when creating complex materials in the basic material editor even with the material navigator open. 

musashidan

Yeah, it would seem so but I'm using the old editor so long now that the depth of the material tree is burned into my brain! Here's an example of a shader tree I've worked with in the past in compact.....

OccultMonk

Slate can get messy too. They need to introduce some way of grouping parts of the tree and being able to temporarily collapse those. I believe Neil Blevens was advocating this to Autodesk.

EliasWick

musashidan said:

Yeah, it would seem so but I'm using the old editor so long now that the depth of the material tree is burned into my brain! Here's an example of a shader tree I've worked with in the past in compact.....

Holy crap...

OccultMonk I am happy that you figured it out!

musashidan

@EliasWick Yes, multi-layered-multi material-blend shaders with loads of composite maps will do this.

@occultmonk I think I avoided Slate when it was first introduced as it just felt way too beta. I'm sure I will switch to it soon enough as I've gotten so used to UE4 matEd that it seems inevitable. Neil is always championing great improvements for Max(his BBM for about 10 years!) and I've seen some of his ideas for Slate. The good news is that now more than ever Max devs are taking feedback/ideas/suggestions seriously.

OccultMonk

musashidan said:

@occultmonk  The good news is that now more than ever Max devs are taking feedback/ideas/suggestions seriously.

But do they get the resources ;-). It Seems like the 3dsmax team is trying hard but Autodesk pushes Maya a lot more.

fat64

I had an issue with the material editor freezing after playing around with the Quicksilver hardware renderer, and found out that it had to do with the amount of seconds I gave to quicksilver. Made a video about it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7Wptw46Ohk

Maybe it will help someone who also stumbles upon this thread while looking for "material editor freezing".