low frame rate in max

Cody

on my laptop. doing some character animation with the low max rig. at 55% cpu usage and 33% memory usage i am only getting 10 fps. help? I'm leaving to work so i will check for answers tonight. using max 9 btw.

Eric Chadwick

Close track view, material editor, and the track bar?

renderhjs

- disable backface culling
- reduce video ram res.
- use flat view if you have textures already on your objects (4x-8x faster)
- isolate when possible (alt + q)
- display less important objects as boxes

- disable any background CPU or RAM intense service - [win]+[r] (run command) type "winconfig" - goto startup and read on the internet what which service is,- any third party stuff like adobe, apple, real player, java scedular,... can be disabled right away.
...

MoP

Disabling the Material Editor is the obvious one - I got 2-3x framerate boost when playing back anims just by closing it, I think it re-draws scene material previews if it's open, which is hugely slow. Or something.

Renderhjs: Are you sure about disable backface culling? Does it do more calculation to work out what's hidden, rather than drawing more polys? I would have thought that enabling backface culling would be faster, but I could well be wrong.

What do you mean by "flat view"? Flat-shaded? I always thought smooth-shaded was the fastest view, is that wrong, or are you talking about something else?

Also, "winconfig" is not a valid command to run, are you sure that's what you meant? At least in XP anyway, is it a Vista-only command maybe?

LEViATHAN

I think he meant msconfig.
Also for disabling services and such, services.msc would probably be better.

renderhjs

he yes, typo thing "msconfig" sorry

since max9 you have the option to set backface culling to black faces in max its unchecking backface culling and it runs alot faster that way,- its just you cant look anymore through backfaces instead it gets black.

as for flat view:
viewport > views >other > flat
does no shading and is by far the fastest,- but only makes sense if you have textures on your character otherwise you will see a flat single color shape.

MoP

Ah cool, I didn't know about the "flat" view option, I think I've been using Maya too much recently

Mark Dygert

Taking a wild stab in the dark but its probably a big drain on the GPU not really the CPU. Besides closing the material editor, turn down your viewport material preview settings. Since you're on a laptop you can't expect to ask too much of the GPU...

Also if you have dynamics running you can toggle their previewing off. Also think about creating a quick low poly stand-in for your model, hiding your semi-dense mesh and animating with the stand in.

Cody

okay, thanks for the tips guys. my laptop is running vista, and i already tweaked the hell out of it, not a lot of fluff running. its got a dual core 2.0ghz, 2gigs of ram, and a geforce 7150m dedicated graphics card. this should be more than enough for some simple one character animation, no?

there are no textures on anything, so material editor is closed with no mats in it. how do you disable it? flat shading did nothing.

i dont know what you mean by running dynamics vig, so....ya

and I didn't make this rig [it's the famous low max rig] so how would i go about optimizing the mesh and make it work with the rig? it's kind of a complicated rig and i have never rigged before. I found an option in the rig to turn off the turbo smooth on all the objects and that got me up to 12 frames a second, so that's a start but nowhere close to what i need to animate efficiently. I need at least 24 fps.

back face culling had little effect and the model is isolated.

so how do you reduce the video ram resolution?

I mean, am I screwed here? I just want to see my animations in 24fps while I am animating. It would be a real pain to have to render it out everytime. Gosh durn it!

Cody

I had the grid hidden, and unhiding that gave me another fps, bringing me to 13.

when i am not playing the animation i get like 40 fps, but when I play the timeline, BAM! 13 fps. FUUU

UUUUDGE D

UCK!

Chai

try changing to openGL just to see how it effects the speed I remember having an issue with directX when animating.

renderhjs

- upgrade to XP just joking ^^

A year ago I had a animation project with CAT and things went horrible slow,- in the end I ended up writing a script that would let me quickly define a time range and then with a single button make a animation preview and instantly view it.
Usually that would take just a few seconds to compute but the preview was always smooth. It did not help in the end that much however animations still sucked I assume because of the bad realtime feedback in the GUI.

there are however better scripts than mine at scriptspot:
http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/animrangesetter
http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/rampreview

Cody

open gl didnt work,

thanks for the scripts ren,

and ya if it wasn't a laptop i would put xp on it but dont want to deal with the issues. have xp on my desktop rig.