3DS Max Triangle count

deazar

Hi !

Just wondering if people in here had any tips or trick to manage 3DSmax crashes due to heavy ZBrush imports. I was wondering if regarding my computer configuration, a maxscript could calculate how many triangles I could import in 3DS Max. I'm tired of restarting Max because of a crash.

Hope my question is not too confusing.

Psyk0

Are you importing using the "hidden layers" trick?

To test your max triangle count you could subdivide an object (like a sphere) and duplicate as many times as possible until you get a crash. I've managed to get around 60 million tris doing this. If you want to play around with heavy meshes you'll get better performance with lots of ram and a 64 bit OS.

Neox

what max version are you using? if something below 2009, grab the guruware importer for those versions, it has a progress bar so you see that you'rem system is noch crashing + it's way faster on import

second, don't let the polygons be shown in viewport, max can handle quite a lot internally created polies, imported will kill your scene, no matter what, i managed to import and bake 30mio quads with gi and 2 bounces inside max, the renderer doesn't care but you should just not let them be shown in the viewport

what i normally do

right click viewport label set to display bounding box only

import the model

rightclick the model > properties > set show as bounding box

hit f3 or f4 to get normal view back

to see the mesh volume when baking i just import a lower subdivided mesh from zbrush/mudbox and use that as a reference, level 2 or 3 normally is enough

deazar

Thanks a lot for those nice tips. I'll try that.

Psyk0: What do you mean by "hidden layers" trick ?

By the way, do you use polygon cruncher ? I've seen that Epic guys use it a lot. But if we can handle 60 millions polygons within Max, is it really useful?

osman

It can be useful for creating quick mockups of your low poly version, It would need some cleaning up afterwards ofcourse.
And I'm sure there are other useful things that canbe done with it.

Neox

@deazar: i guess instead of doing it the way i do it he just imports the model into a hidden layer, just so the viewport doesn't render the model

Psyk0

deazar wrote: »

Thanks a lot for those nice tips. I'll try that.

Psyk0: What do you mean by "hidden layers" trick ?

By the way, do you use polygon cruncher ? I've seen that Epic guys use it a lot. But if we can handle 60 millions polygons within Max, is it really useful?

Like Neox said, in the layer manager: set the "0 default" layer to hidden so when you import max isnt trying to read and display the heavy meshes at the same time. Turning on display as box or activating "override adaptive degradation" is also needed sometimes. Other workaround would be to break your object into multiple subobjects and bake each of them separately and merge the maps in photoshop. So far i havent reached the 50-60 millions limit, mostly because the hard surface work is done with turbosmooth modifier which can be set to higher values at render time instead of being displayed in the viewport.