CGTalk - Problems with a max file.

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Darkmatter

09-08-2004, 04:45 AM

I have a very big max file that I have been working on for my demo reel. It started as a class project, but that class is now over and now i am working on it in my spare time while I work on other classes.

This file is BIG, its 110 megs and thats after I've deleted many backfaces and other unseen poly's. The scene has over 10k objects in it, so I EXPECT it to handle somewhat slow. Unfortunatly this scene is beyond slow, the system almost seems to hang while loading and saving. It takes about 10 min to save and load this file. This file has sort of a sorted history which I need to explain.

The scene itself is of a destroyed block of NY City. The reason it has so many objects is all the debrie in it. When I first made the file it was way to large in unit size and I was unable to use shadow map shadows. I wasn't aware of the tool "scale world units" so at the time I resized the whole scene using an xform. Unfortunatly, this had the unwanted effect of making EVERY object unique. I continued to work on the file revising the modeling and putting in temporary simbiot max textures so I could get a mark for the project. After, I found out that I could have just scaled the world units and retained all of the instanced debrie... SO, what I did was I changed all the procedual textures to standard default grey textures since they were only temporary anyways, and I then took the time to import any old objects I could so I would have at least SOME instanced objects. I managed to replace about 50% of the objects with the older models from an old file and my file size dropped from 140megs to 110 but the file is still horribly slow to move around in any loading and saving takes at least 10 mintues. While it is loading and saving I often see that the cpu is at 1 or 2% in the task manager for 5 min at a time before it picks up again.

I've removed almost every object or poly that I can without increasing my time 10fold, and I've turned things into editable meshs to speed up the display but I am at a loss what else I should do. Working on this file is pure mysery... :(

Any help would be great, thanks. :)

Darkmatter

My system specs

P4 3ghz with HT, Abit IC7 MB, 1 gig of ram, ATI 9800pro, XP Pro OS.

Tommy5547

09-08-2004, 08:13 AM

Have you tried the MultiRes or the Optimize-modifer?

These reduces the number of polygons on the mesh.
If you use it wisely on objects far from the POV, one will not see the difference.

Sometimes Max saves the file and it becomes huge. In this case I think it's normal because of all the objects.

Some people say that if you export it to Obj (not sure if it was Obj) and then import it to Max again and save it, the file COULD be smaller. Do a search about it in the forums. I think it was here I read about it.

Darkmatter

09-08-2004, 09:00 PM

Im not sure if I can lower the poly's. Part of my demo is that a futuristic probe flies through the scene searching for something. What I want to do, is have cuts of from the view of the probe, complete with an interface that zooms in on objects and scans them, so I can't really lower the detail of objects. I did have an insperation last night thought. I realized that many of my objects still had modifiers in the stack and I thought that many objects might cause the computer to slow down. SO... I started collapsing the stacks and changing any poly objects to mesh's without losing the instances. Unfortunatly I've probably removed the stacks on 80% of my objects without it effecting the load/save times.... And I took a closer look at the time, its more like 20+ min, not 10....... :sad: I still have a few things to do, but when I'm done I'll try the export, import trick.

Anyone else with any suggestions? :)
Thanks

Darkmatter

09-18-2004, 01:19 AM

Well I found the problem. It took a while to track it down, but it turned out to be something not even IN the scene. It seems that at some point way back I tinkered with using Radiosity. Because my scene has around 10k objects in it, the Radiosity solution was killing my scene. Once I got rid of the Radiosity, my file went from 650mb, to 90mb. :)

Just thought I'd post what the problem was incase anyone else developed the same problem in the future.

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