3DS Max Performance

SnarG

Well I'm dabbling in some sub-d modelling, which is a new thing for me, and while I'm enjoying it I've run into a bit of a roadblock... Max just can't keep up!

Anything over 200k tris and I start to get slow down, 500k plus just makes it unusable. I've had a quick googling on the subject but haven't turned up much, so just wondered if anyone had any tips on increasing performance, options perhaps that I'm unaware of.

I'm running version 9 of Max.

pior

Are you using turbosmooth, with isolines display turned on?
It should be fast enough!

Mark Dygert

Depends on your system, what shaders you're running, what your viewport display settings are set to, if you have backface culling turned on, how long your modifier stack is, what modifiers you have applied, how many views you have active and what they are set to...

Tons of stuff to tweak.

Also 2k8 and 2k9 had pretty big improvements to preformance so you might want to think about upgrading.

Shogun3d

Another thing you can do is hit "O" on the keyboard so a bounding box is visible instead of the entire mesh as you rotate.

SnarG

pior wrote: »

Are you using turbosmooth, with isolines display turned on?
It should be fast enough!

Yep.

Vig wrote: »

Depends on your system, what shaders you're running, what your viewport display settings are set to, if you have backface culling turned on, how long your modifier stack is, what modifiers you have applied, how many views you have active and what they are set to...

Tons of stuff to tweak.

Also 2k8 and 2k9 had pretty big improvements to preformance so you might want to think about upgrading.

System is mostly competent, although my single core Athlon 64 4000+ is getting pretty long in the tooth. Got an 8600 GTX to power the graphics and 3Gb of DDR2 400 for the memory (again, a little archaic). Backface culling is always turned on, I collapse the stack as soon as I'm done with a modifier and I usually work solely in perspective unless I'm aligning something. Viewport tends to be set to wireframe and shaded so I can see the forms as I'm modelling.

As for an upgrade, I'm afraid that's not on the cards for a while yet.

kaburan wrote: »

Another thing you can do is hit "O" on the keyboard so a bounding box is visible instead of the entire mesh as you rotate.

This one I didn't know, and it may come in handy, so thanks very much, kaburan.

And thanks everyone for your replies.

MoP

What are your graphics settings set to? I assume you're using Direct3D rendering. Do you have "use cached d3dxmeshes" option turned on? If not, try it.

Blaizer

heheh 3dsmax is not a good application for subdiv models, i recommend you to try silo or modo, you can work in isoline mode without efforts.

In Max, you can work well with subdiv models if your model is builded by multiple pieces. Try changind the Direct3d options, it should make your work easier but not as you may expect. Use also adaptative degradation too, it's a button located near the animation keys.

t4paN

Personally, I've switched to windaz xp 64 and I've noticed huge improvements in max, even while using max9 32bit.

e.g. while working with 1mil polys max would be practically crawling, and right now, after upgrading both OS and max at 64 bit I can work at more than 2mil.