Home Technical Talk

3 seconds away from kicking Max square in the nuts

polycounter lvl 19
Offline / Send Message
adam polycounter lvl 19
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 :)

Replies

  • MoP
    Options
    Offline / Send Message
    MoP polycounter lvl 18
    Max 2008 bug. Several other people have mentioned this, and I've seen it happen on a few machines on Max 2008. Oddly enough it doesn't seem like a consistent thing, I can't seem to replicate it all the time.
    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 :)
  • adam
    Options
    Offline / Send Message
    adam polycounter lvl 19
    Did it fuck up your exports when bringing the geometry in to the engine? That's what I'm worried most about but I'm too early in to this map to properly bring it in.

    Thanks Paul
  • Blaizer
    Options
    Offline / Send Message
    Blaizer interpolator
    100k and 30 fps? so slow? O.o

    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.
  • adam
    Options
    Offline / Send Message
    adam polycounter lvl 19
    Well I guess your cock is bigger than mine and your dad can beat up my dad too eh? Get outta my thread you cockamamie scoundrel!

    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.
  • MoP
    Options
    Offline / Send Message
    MoP polycounter lvl 18
    No, it doesn't affect exports as far as I recall, it seems mainly to be a viewport drawing optimisation issue - the UVs sometimes magically fix if you just stop moving the viewport and select a vert or something. And adding a Unwrap modifier shows the UVs are all correct.

    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.
  • adam
    Options
    Offline / Send Message
    adam polycounter lvl 19
    Speaking of a metric fuckload (fL) of materials assigned in Max, my new magic trick when this causes a decrease in frames per second is exporting the entire thing to a 3DS and reimporting it in to max and gaining 20+ FPS. It's fucked that it works, but it works and I won't argue with it.

    Sorta like the magic-box trick in Max.
  • Eric Chadwick
    Options
    Offline / Send Message
    The screwy-UVs bug has been around since Max 9 at least. Had no effect on exports for me though.
  • adam
    Options
    Offline / Send Message
    adam polycounter lvl 19
    Is there a definitive fix out there? That's the question.
  • Rob Galanakis
    Options
    Offline / Send Message
    You can turn off cached D3D Meshes in your viewport driver config. Unfortunately I think this also slows things down... but it has always fixed the problem for me.

    And yes it is just a display problem that has been around since Max 9 or so.
  • Tumerboy
    Options
    Offline / Send Message
    Tumerboy polycounter lvl 17
    Ya I had similar issues a while ago. I think I 'fixed' it using the usual Max catch-all: Start a new scene, and merge everything from the fucked up one into it, then resave over your old file. (I may be mistaken, can't really remember)
  • adam
    Options
    Offline / Send Message
    adam polycounter lvl 19
    Rob - I did that and doing so had actually fucked the UV's of other objects that were using 2nd UV's. Weird eh?

    Nick - I'll give that a whirl!
  • Blaizer
    Options
    Offline / Send Message
    Blaizer interpolator
    Heh, i'm working with a workstation graphic card, and with maxtreme drivers. The commented bug is something i ignored :S, and i didn't noticed it using a nvidia 6800 ultra. And i only use edit poly in Max, and of course multiple maps. This is fucking visual bug very weird.

    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.
Sign In or Register to comment.