Max Morpher Woes

Quasar

I've been working with morph targets in MAX 8 for the past while and noticed something very annoying. I found that when I collapsed an object's modifier stack, where the morpher modifier was in the stack, the object would suddenly become a resource hog. My file size would go up a few megabytes, the saving time would increase dramatically and max just ran slowly when the object was selected. Is there a way to remove the data from my object that's slowing down max? I've tried converting the object to edit poly a number of times and also reset the x-form, but nothing happens. I can actually do a work around for now, but I'd still like to know if it's possible to fix this issue.

Cheers!

gavku

You could try creating a cube, attach your object to the cube, then delete the cube. This is what I usually do when I have a corrupted mesh etc....

Mark Dygert

It isn't currupt, it baked all the vert data for the morph targets into your mesh when you collapsed. It works just like the UVW Unwrap when you collapse. They do that so you can still access the morph data thru controllers if you need to. The only real way to remove it is to export it to something like obj and re-import it. You might want to try creating a snapshot of it, Tools > snapshot it will create a new object kind of like clone but it will be just a mesh, and might clear the morph data. So far the only way I know to see what morph data is stuck inside a mesh is to use the load/save animation feature.

If you are using biped and you could have excess collections.
If you notice the file size is also getting bigger than it should or it takes an unusually long time to save your scene, you might have an execess number of BIP Collections. If you merge bi-ped's (and sometimes non bi-ped objects) into a scene it will load extra collections and cause max to chug while saving and sometimes crash.

Click a BiPed object
Click the Motion tab
Go to the copy paste roll out
Under the Copy Collections drop down menu, click the right icon (hand pointing to a piece of paper) called Max Load Perferances.
Uncheck Upon Max File Load: load collections
Save and open your file again, check the drop down menu and you should have ZERO collecitons and the file size should be much smaller.

If for some reason you need all those collections you should turn off the auto snap shot feature as all those snap shots are stored in the max file and are contributing to the large file size and memory hogging.

Quasar

Huh, I see. I figured the morph data gets baked too, but I don't see why it has to bog down max. Anyway, I'll just avoid collapsing the morpher modifier in the future, but it would be nice if there was a utility for removing unwanted data. I also wasn't using character studio, so I didn't have the Biped issue, but thanks for pointing it out, I'll keep it in mind.