3 seconds away from kicking Max square in the nuts
polycounter lvl 20
Alright, I'm working on a relatively expensive environment in Max at the moment. 100k+ triangle, roughly 30 materials, etc. It runs great (30fps) and working on it is a breeze.
However, some objects are acting screwy. Basically, when I look at them in the viewport and convert them to Edit Poly or collapse their stack, they look & act fine. However, the second I move the viewport frame, even a simple nudge, some polys act as though their UV's just got royally fucked. It's not until I convert > edit poly or collapse again that it goes back to looking unwrapped & sexy.
Converting to Edit Mesh has them acting perfectly fine all the time, so this has me thinking its an Edit Poly issue.
Perhaps my graphcis card (drivers completely up to date?)
Render issue?
If anyone helps me there's a cookie & high-five in it for you.
Thanks
However, some objects are acting screwy. Basically, when I look at them in the viewport and convert them to Edit Poly or collapse their stack, they look & act fine. However, the second I move the viewport frame, even a simple nudge, some polys act as though their UV's just got royally fucked. It's not until I convert > edit poly or collapse again that it goes back to looking unwrapped & sexy.
Converting to Edit Mesh has them acting perfectly fine all the time, so this has me thinking its an Edit Poly issue.
Perhaps my graphcis card (drivers completely up to date?)
Render issue?
If anyone helps me there's a cookie & high-five in it for you.
Thanks
Replies
As you found out, it definitely seems to be related to Editable Poly. Our technical guys at work suggested it was maybe a dodgy optimisation in Max where they were trying to keep the vertex count down and lost UV seam information somehow (the UV errors i saw were always around seams - UV pieces in the center of UV islands were always fine).
You could maybe try switching your display mode over to OpenGL from Direct3D, see if that helps. Also try updating your DirectX install to make sure it's totally up to date. Graphics drivers, too. You never know.
But yeah, pain in the ass, and not 100% replicable it seems, the worst kind of bug
Thanks Paul
I can handle 20+ million of poligons and work smoothly with all the objects (edit poly too). Update your drivers and try d3d with show all triangles.
Kidding asside, 30fps is fantastic if you ask me and I'm on D3D as it is. OpenGL in max makes me stick forks in my eyes.
Blaizer: Well, viewport performance really depends on a number of things. If you have "Used cached D3DX meshes" enabled in the D3D viewport settings, then highpoly objects will display a lot faster after a short initial pre-loading time, if this is turned off then you will get much lower framerates with highpoly objects.
Also it depends on number of materials, if you have a complex scene with tens or hundreds of unique materials assigned to objects, viewport framerate will be affected a lot, it's just like draw calls in a game engine (state changes, batches, whatever you want to call them - more is slower), so again if you just have a single material applied to all your objects then FPS in the viewport will be very high.
There are a lot of settings and variables, not just out-of-date drivers or slow computers which can cause lower FPS in viewports. It really depends what is going on in the scene, not so much the number of polys.
Sorta like the magic-box trick in Max.
And yes it is just a display problem that has been around since Max 9 or so.
Nick - I'll give that a whirl!
Tweaking the d3d config you should see any perfomance, and maybe a solution?, i ran with perfomance problems several years ago and i had all edges visible to work well. Max can be something terrible!, in a new pc i work in modo with a simple 8400GS without any problems, and it's an opengl software.
New versions of Max have the option for adaptative degradation, activating it you can get a bit of perfomance too. I think it should be "on" by default.