max slow, help!

[notamondayfan]

hey guys,

ive been given a massive file, created in auto cad, with xrefs all over. theres a complete file, from which, they require me to do some renders. the only prob is its takin about 30 mins 2 align a camera, cause the pc im working on it so slow. is there an option to jus show main bounding boxes in the active viewports, or something else that wud make it easier to set up?

 

cheers, deano

[Ricardo Eloy]

You can divide your buildings in layers and manage the view options to each one, i.e. choose the layers you don't want to see in full detail and have them do show as box.

[theqball]

Probably one of the more important things to watch on cad data is your object count. You can check this by going to File -> Summery Info. On most systems things will begin to slow down around 6,000~8,000 by that depends on your hardware. So the first thing to do is to control how many objects are being drawn by turning on and off layers as Rick had mentioned.

Next you could turn off backface cull on all your objects to get you a little more speed. I would also recommend running max/viz in D3D mode and preferably DX 9. This will allow you to take advantage of mesh caching in the viewports. Last you could enable adaptive degradation and set it to bbox (search in the help docs for more info on that).

Things to avoid… shaded+wireframe and wireframe in general. I recommend working in just shaded mode, it can be faster than bbox in some cases with the mesh caching.

[Tyorl]

There is a trick... If U had a lot of lines U should use OpenGL instead of D3D. I think U know the difference between them, but if not - when u r using D3D all in your viewport drawing by your graphic card, and when u use OpenGL all u see in viewport drawing by using your CPU power... If I understand prosess right...

[theqball]

when u r using D3D all in your viewport drawing by your graphic card, and when u use OpenGL all u see in viewport drawing by using your CPU power...

 

actually, nope both use the graphics card. software is the one that doesn't but would be the slowest.