image plane's are crippling my PC

[Heinrich]

Are the image planes regular geometry(nurbs or polys)or did you set them up thru the camera. If you set the image up thru the camera it will slow it down, but if you use geometry it wont.

[iC4]

there is a plugin on highend3d.com which makes image planes easier and alot faster, I'm sure you will find it

[MCronin]

Image planes are hardware accelerated. If your image planes are not square powers of two they will cripple your video card. Take the images into PS and resize their canvases so they are 512x512 or 1024x1024 and your computer will handle them fine. Also, if your reference images are the same size to beign with and prealigned in PS you don't have to futz around with lining them up in Maya.

[tauf]

Here's another trick to speed things up even on slow graphics cards:

Set up your image planes in Maya with your ortho cameras as usual. Once they are translated and in place, duplicate your ortho cameras that use image planes (result i.e. front1, side1, top1) and look thru and pan/zoom those cameras instead. Because the new cameras don't have attached image planes, they'll pan/zoom much faster. You may even want to lock the transforms on your original cameras so that you won't pick them by accident. When you restart Maya and load your scene you may notice that the viewports have switched back to looking through the original cameras. Just switch the ortho views in the Panels pulldown menu.

Hope that helps.

[Gentle Fury]

your using maya 3.0 or earlier...........from ver 4 and up image planes were fixed. I dont have any troubles with em......and your specs show that you shouldnt either.


Happy Rendering!

[MCronin]

He may need a driver upgrade. I had this problem with Maya 4.0, I just tried it out with Maya 4 and 4.5 using Detonator 4 drivers and now it seems to handle image planes of any reasonable size an shape fine. I pretty sure the nvidia drivers that gave me this trouble were 29 or below.

[BlissDD]

hi guys,

Cheers for all your help...problem was that i was using freaky sizes in the planes,,,once o sorted them out to 512x512 1024x512 etc....it back to speedy gonzales!!

Thanks alot for all your help!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Cheers dudes :bounce:

[dmcgrath]

also Ive noticed that if you mess with the Alpha of the image planes, it will kill your speed. Get used to using them and turning them on and off, but dont mess with teh Alpha gain in the channel box.

But I'm glad you got the problem fixed.

[MaDSheeP]

Hey Grath....

i was running into the same problem, and even resizing the planes in ps to like.. 1280x1280 and such.. didn't help at all.. but that tip you tossed out about the Alpha gain was it!

i will just change that in photoshop and save myself the 5FPS in maya...

in all actuality, it wasn't that bad.. just when i had the entire plane in my view did it really chug

here are my specs, very similar to Bliss

2100+
1.5gb Mushkin
2x40GB Maxtor
GF4 4400

Damn GF4.. i shoulda gotten a Quadro 500 ;)

but anyway, thanks for the tip! :)

[MCronin]

1280x1280 wouldn't have worked. 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, and *maybe* 4096 depending on the card, etc should all be valid sizes.

[MaDSheeP]

hehe.. doh...

well.. anyway... i made them both 1024x1024 just to see if there was a performance difference... and i didn't notice any.. but turning off the Color Gain worked like a charm! :)

[mayic]

Just wanted to throw my too cents in. I ran into this problem in a class at Gnomon and the teacher just copied the cameras as Tauf said (Panels-Orthographic-New-front, side, top as the case may be).

We were working on some screaming Boxx stations and the image plane still slowed us down. What was odd was the slower machines in the other labs didn't have this problem but its a good work around.

:beer:

cheers

[tauf]

Originally posted by mayic
Just wanted to throw my too cents in. I ran into this problem in a class at Gnomon and the teacher just copied the cameras as Tauf said (Panels-Orthographic-New-front, side, top as the case may be).

We were working on some screaming Boxx stations and the image plane still slowed us down. What was odd was the slower machines in the other labs didn't have this problem but its a good work around.

:beer:

cheers

The Boxx machines are running with Quadro4 900's. The other machines may be using Wildcat 5110's. For most all performance tests (dynamics especially) the Quadro4 is faster. However, default (non-copied camera) Image Plane support on the Quadro4 is not as smooth as the Wildcats for some reason. So if you aren't running a Wildcat card and are having slow image plane problems, ortho camera copies can speed things up.

Also, I am running on an older 32MB card and can throw up multiple image planes and adjust their color gain and offset to whatever and everything runs just fine, as long as I duplicate the ortho cameras. It really does solve a wealth of problems. If I switch back to the image plane cameras, then everything is painfully slow.

i.e. I just loaded three different 1280x1024 image planes in each ortho view, changed their color gain and offset, duplicated the orthos and everything runs great...on a 3.5 year old 32MB card.

:lightbulb

[pdunham]

put this line in your maya.env file

MAYA_SLOW_DRAWPIXELS = 1

that fixed it for me

[BlissDD]

Hi Guys...me again...

Once i have duplicated my Ortho camera's....how do i view through the duplicated ones???

CHeers again

[MaDSheeP]

Hey pdunham, that argument i put in my Env file worked like a charm!

thanks! :)

[pdunham]

No problem, someone mentioned it at highend3d.com. I couldn't find anything about it in the maya docs(4.0 or 4.5). I don't know why it isnt set by default, image planes are almost unuseable wihthout it. Anyone know how to go about finding other undocumented environment variables?
-Philip

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