3Ds Max not using graphics card properly

DigitalDilettante

Hey just wondering if anyone else has had issues with 3Ds Max not using the graphics card to its maximum potential. I never really noticed it before I started using Mudbox to create very high poly meshes. Within Mudbox I can push my computer and get a fine fps when getting above 10 million faces but then when I import the mesh into 3Ds Max it just dies (about 1 frame per 10 seconds).

I have an ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2, a duel GPU with 1GB of RAM. It should be able to handle super high poly meshes fine (which it does within Mudbox). Though when I'm working in 3Ds Max I notice that in Catalyst Control Centre (GPU performance monitor) the graphics card is completely inactive. The view port driver configuration is set to my graphics card so I'm not really sure what to do next. Any ideas?

CMM

This is most likely because of how the different software handles geometry mathematically. Sculpting software such as Mudbox and Zbrush is built to handle millions of polygons, 3DS MAX however is not. Your RAM is going to be getting hit pretty hard with that many poly's. I would export your sculpt with a lower subdivision level and try again. And also make sure you don't have everything turned on in the 3DS MAX viewport. Keep things off like showing materials in the viewport, scene lights and shadows, etc.

SpeCter

That´s because Mudbox actually uses your graphics card but max does not(almost not) all the heavy computations are made by cpu just some small part is handled by gpu.
Max wasn´t made to handle such dense meshes unfortunately.

DigitalDilettante

I just made a crap load of teapots inside of 3Ds Max, got up to around 10 million Tris and 3Ds Max started using my GPU and actually it ran pretty well! But when I imported a 4 Million tris mesh exported out of Mudbox it pretty much crashed max.

Cheers SpeCter that was my first thought. Does Max have problems with single meshes that are incredibly high poly? As it seemed to handle a dozen teapots at maximum quality alright.

Mark Dygert

DigitalDilettante wrote: »

Cheers SpeCter that was my first thought. Does Max have problems with single meshes that are incredibly high poly? As it seemed to handle a dozen teapots at maximum quality alright.

Yep it has always worked better with many separate meshes than one whole mesh. The reason being "adaptive degradation" (shortcut O) is handled on the object level not sub-object level.

Adaptive degradation will turn off map slots and even downgrade materials to their base color. It does this on objects that aren't selected or aren't close to the viewport camera, it will also lighten the load by turning on wireframe then bounding box for objects, if the viewport drops below a speed threshold.

If you have a plane with 200,000,000 rivets and they are all separate objects will preform better than if they're all joined one mesh. Instead keeping them as separate objects will help in a few ways:
You can instance them so what you do to one rivet gets done to all the others.
You can group them so only one group "rivets" shows up in menus
Adaptive degradation still works on groups.
If groups aren't all that great for you, sorting things by layers and setting the objects to inherit their properties from the layer (right click > object properties, turn from object to layer) is a good way to set them globally.

If you joined all those teapots together into one object it would slow down quite a bit because the object that is has a choice to degrade is the priority object that it is trying desperately not to degrade.


When its all one mesh, it has very little it can optimize to lighten the scene, it wouldn't hide sub-objects like elements or polys of an object instead it would work hard to keep them on screen at all cost.

You can also speed up viewports by:
Not having your bitmap display settings cranked, (configure driver preferences),
Operate in one viewport.
If you have multiple views up keep most of them in wireframe mode with default lighting.
Having backface culling turned off will speed things up a bit too.

DigitalDilettante

Cheers Mark, that was very helpful and informative. I will try your suggestions for speeding up the view ports next time I'm having problems. Much thanks!