Sloooow material editor

[AJLynn]

I've got a scene, using mental ray 3.5 with Arch&Design materials and some Standards, and lots of them, inside multi/sub materials. It's an import of somebody else's model and I don't have the time to correct its issues and simplify it.

 

The main problem is that the number of materials is killing the speed of the material editor, so anything I do in there takes forever to update, even if I use options like manual update and only update current.

 

Anybody have any other methods of making this suck less? I can't clear the materials out of the editor because I need to be working on them...

[cferman]

I've had the same problems - definitely stemming for the A&D Materials

 

Have you tried working on the materials one at a time - you don't necessarily "need" all of your materials in the editor at once.

[Claudio Branch]

Are you using a Gradient Ramp in any of the materials?

 

My ME has also slowed down quite noticeably when using the GR (usually in the opacity slot).

[cferman]

I wasn't using a gradient map, however, it was definitely related to the opacity map.

 

I was using the opacity slot for 2d Tree planes. Works great to a certain extent due to the fact it would work with environment fog.

 

Then when I tried to render - it looked like a 1970's disco party - there were different color specs all over the material.

[AJLynn]

I had fun on my last one killing color spots. Turns out I had some Architectural materials contaminating my model from an old context model. For the current issue - no opacity maps but I've got some A&D thin geometry glass. Maybe I can find a way to only have one material loaded at a time. I got the original modeler to reduce the number of materials too.

[Claudio Branch]

I'm sure that you know that you can just clear the slots and use the eyedropper to select an assigned material?

 

...I suppose with a large Multi Sub-object Mat it could still run slow though.

 

I keep my ME pretty empty as habit now.

[cferman]

You just reminded of a original a&d problem I had.

 

I had a scene where I had 2 different water levels - long story short I had one plane on top of another plane (about 5 feet difference in height). It was taking the scene about 20x longer to render.

 

Likewise - when I am doing a building rendering, I will make sure that the windows are only 1-sided, no thickness

 

Also - unless you have a LOT of time - turn your glossy samples down to about 3 or 4 (default 8). This will save a lot of time...

[Mechadus]

Though it doesnt work all the time, you might try setting your material editor to use a different renderer (scanline for instance). Your materials may not update correctly, but when working with opacity maps, or even just huge image maps it can speed up redraw quite a bit

 

I also keep my material editor set to 3x2 slots - fewer materials to redraw means less time spent waiting on MAX

[Brian Smith]

I am about 99% sure it's because of the network paths specified in the material editor. If you want to fix it, try copying a blank material into each one of the sample slots so that it will not try to load the material from the non-existant network path.

 

Also, if you are not online when you open the file, you might find it opens immediately once you establish a network connection. We had this problem a long time ago and it took forever to open the file and the material editor until we did what i suggest.

[AJLynn]

That's not it - the maps are on the local drive, but in the future I'll watch for that. Thanks.

[Justin Hunt]

With the network paths is more about the search paths than what maps are loaded. If there are alot of search paths it can slow things alot.

 

However I think this is a A&D thing. A&D are quite complex shaders so every time you load ME or update a parameter the shader is being recreated.

 

Try only having the materials that you are directly working on loaded.

 

JHV

[notamondayfan]

why dont you just reset the material editor, and simply select the material you need to adjust when you need to?

[AJLynn]

That's what I ended up doing - after I got the original modeler to cut down the number of materials being used to represent the same thing. Moral of the story: no agreeing to work on a file before checking it.

[Zdravko Barisic]

That's what I ended up doing - after I got the original modeler to cut down the number of materials being used to represent the same thing. Moral of the story: no agreeing to work on a file before checking it.

 

I did not read it above, do you maybe use MAX 9 x64?