Map Browser (Not Responding)

[Devin Johnston]

Has anyone noticed in Max 2014 that the material map browser will just stop responding forcing a shutdown? This is happening to me several times per day, Max 2012 didn't do this.

[Scott Schroeder]

I get it from time to time, I even got it on 2013. For me, if I waited long enough, the browser would come back and I could continue working.

 

If I set all the little balls to display as text only, I never got it. I thought this was fixed in 2014 in one of the service packs?

[Devin Johnston]

I've got SP3 installed so I don't think so, I'll try the text thing.

 

Thanks Scott

[Justin Hunt]

do you have massive maps, like HDRI's that are over 50mb? These slow me down. What about filtering the scene maps to be "Selected Only"?

[Scott Dombrowski]

The slowdown happens because Max is actually rendering a preview of each material in the material browser. Setting the "Display Group (and Subgroup) as..." dialog to text helps reduce the number of materials it renders, but it still renders all the materials visible in your material view window. You may notice that if you pan around and expose more material nodes that weren't previously visible, it'll freeze again while it renders those too. There's a little teapot icon in the lower left corner that will disable this rendering and speed things up significantly.

[Scott Schroeder]

Leave it to Autodesk to take 2 hours to render a 50x50 pixel preview and when I hit render on my giant 4k render it only takes 5-7 minutes to render out at preview quality.

[Devin Johnston]

You'd think Max could cache the images so that it would only have to render the image once, I guess that's not "interactive" enough for them. I know it does this once per session but why not keep the information permanently? This is par for the course for Autodesk, introduce some new features and break some old ones that have never had problems before.