Object count NOT polycount limits display speed

[EricChadwick]

What hardware are you using? I've found the quality of my graphics card can make a big difference, like a pro-level card. Different cards run OpenGL or D3D faster.

I think the same thing occurs with Max as does with your game... each object needs its own transforms. The more objects, the more transforms to calculate to render a frame.

However your game probably has optimizations like culling, mips, LOD, etc. that Max doesn't do for the most part, since it is an authoring tool. Multiple views at once, modifier stacks to calculate, etc.

Maybe you could try using a Camera with clipping planes? Collapse the stacks? A couple ideas...

[maxmare]

Sorry, no solution from me, but I must say I have noticed that as well and that's why I always try to merge objects into one mesh whenever possible. Maybe it's got to do with the way Max has to store its data tree in memory and the way to access the data when displaying, in which case...well, you know!
I assume you aren't using HEIDI as the display driver?. Just a thought.

[pixelherder]

...i cant remember everything off the top of my head, but i'll try and cover the main points

Display - i'm using a geforce 4, but with the slow scene (all the individual objects) the max frame rate seems to be the same across the board - open gl, d3d, heidi. I'm guessing that its the cpu/memory load thats grinding things too a halt.

Collapsing - the game engine uses instanced objects in a tile like fashion to reduce the memory overhead (e.g. a room would be made of instanced sections of wall geometry etc) Therefore collapsing the mesh isnt practical because then you lose the benefits of instancing. So the console can display these things fine, its AUTHORING them thats so slow.

A previous title's levels took 10-15 minutes just to load - you can imagine the effect this had on workflow (no room for tweaking, experimentation, just had to stick with what you got)

The general consensus seems to be that this is just the way max is, and theres not a lot you can do.

drat!

[EricChadwick]

Did you post on the Discreet board? Lots of knowledge over there...

[EricChadwick]

Oh, just remembered. I have a little script around here somewhere called InstanceOMatic that will let you re-associate the instance link between mulitple objects.

So you could use the Collapse util, then re-instance.

Or are the stacks collapsed already?

[pixelherder]

i've got the same question over on the discreet boards, but i dont know if the answer will be any different

the instanced geometry we use is "final asset" standard - that means its modifier stack has been collapsed and its just a simple editable mesh*

*on a completely unrelated note, i made a benchmark scene with dozens of teapots, total of 400,000 faces. Ran pretty smooth as primitives. ran ok when converted to editable mesh - framerate went through the floor when converted to editable poly. Odd but interesting!

[EricChadwick]

Huh.... maybe max is slow in converting to tris for hardware. Bummer.

Here's that script anyhow.

http://www.scriptspot.com/Main_Scripts.asp?BrowseType=Search&Sort=Popularity&ST=-1&SearchField=Instance-O-Matic

[pixelherder]

thanks for the feedback fellas

cheers!

[Invader Zim]

How big are your texture sheets and how many of them do you use? This could slow down your machine.
I work on scenes that have more than 60 000 triangles and they work fine and they don't take more than 1 minute to open. Have you tried opening them on another computer? You shouldn't have problems especially if you intance everything. Maybe your MAX or version of windows need to be reinstall.

Have you tried calling a witch doctor ? ;)

[sam]

Have you tried putting an editable mesh modifier on top of all your stacks?

Also, have you tried using Maxtreme, it gives a very sizeable speed boost to the viewport speed

[halo]

its because max isn't very good at handling large data sets...1000 of 10 poly objects will be way slower than ten 1000 poly objects or even one 10000 poly object.
This is because for every object there is the axis data, the position data, all the properties data (like renderable etc), as well as any modifier data you may have....when you have one object you just have one set of data....it shows that the gfx card handles polys far better than your machine is handling data

more ram may help if your running out and a faster processor will, but i really doubt this is anything to do with your gfx card

[CGTalk Moderation]

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.