3DS Max time slider incredibly slow

[Chris MacDonald]

Hey,

 

I'm trying to make an animation and all that is going to be animated is the cameras, nothing much else, however; when I try to move the time slider forwards max pretty much freezes for a few minutes until it gets to the next frame - I've tried merging the XRefs in to see if that was causing the issue, and I've tried turning off plugins like Multiscatter - still to no avail.

 

Any ideas? The poly count is large (1.5 million polys), but not astronomical - I'm getting a decent FPS whilst navigating the scene normally.

Edited November 1, 2012 by Macker

[Chris MacDonald]

Oh god it's driving me mad!

 

I've narrowed the problem down to a load of plants that are in the scene, all of them are editable poly's (which are then scattered by multiscatter, which is also turned off). As soon as I delete these objects from the scene, the time slider becomes useable again.

 

I've tried resetting the XForm on all of them and making sure there are no animation keyframes, and the problem still persists. Even if I delete everything except the smallest little tuft of grass the problem persists.

 

[edit] I've tried converting all of the plants responsible to VRay proxies and setting them to bounding box, and it's still not fixed anything.

Edited November 1, 2012 by Macker

[Chris MacDonald]

Found the source of the problem; Gradient Ramps in the material. Apparently they make the time slider in max lag like crazy? Very, very strange considering they weren't even animated.

[salvador]

Oh boy! Asked and self-answered.

 

I am intrigued. This gradients were in the plants material? what channel?

[Chris MacDonald]

They were all in the diffuse channel, it's the iGrass pack by Rendering.ru (the multiscatter guys). I've been using iGrass for ages now, but this is the first time I've tried to use it in an animation.