VERY slow opening of 3dsmax scenes

[acjwalker]

Hi People,

 

This is going to be a long post but I want to get the problem we are having explained clearly.

 

We have recently moved offices and now have our own dedicated server which we do not share with the rest of the company which is great but since then our files take an incredibly long time to load.

 

We are using 3ds Max 2014 and Vray 2.4

 

We are an Arch Viz company which we work on a number of types of projects from static images to animations. File sizes can vary from 50mb to 300mb (at least.) We can have a varied amount of textures in our scenes which also include Vray Proxies and xrefed files.

 

I have a strong belief it is to do with our new server and the IP / Network address it uses. I will now explain the two ways we have had the servers set up:

 

 

Old Network:

 

We had two mapped drives one with our job folders with our max files in and another with all our resources in.

 

The address we used to connect to the server for our jobs as a mapped drives was \\xservex\cgiwork\job folder

The address we used to connect to the server for our resources as a mapped drive was\\xservex\cgiresources

 

Now obviously the larger the scenes the longer they took to load and there was a very large amount of files to go through. We also shared this with the artwork department who were all on iMacs and used Quark.

 

New Server (what we are having issues with):

 

Again we have a server with two mapped drives with our max files and another with our resources in.

 

The address we used to connect to the server for our jobs as a mapped drives is \\10.xxx.xx.xxx\cgiwork\job folder

The address we used to connect to the server for our resources as a mapped drive is \\10.xxx.xx.xx\cgiresources

 

As you can see the difference between the two is that they are now using IP address to map the drive rather than xservex.

 

When we open up files (obviously speed changes on file size) they take at long time to open, sometimes 20mins. The scenes still contain the same resources and xrefs.

 

The way around this is we disconnect while the file is loading. We have to be careful how quickly we do this as proxies have to be completley loaded. When we disconnect the scene and it opens you can see that it has loaded some of the textures but now all of them as they are just the colour of the object.

 

If we open the material editor it will also take a very long time unless we disconnect. The previews will sometimes be black as they have not loaded but just going into the map and reloading it the texture appears.

 

Now none of thesse problems were here before and I think it is to do with the changes to the address changing from text xservex to an IP number.

 

Can anyone help?

 

If I need to go into more deails just ask.

 

Andrew

[Francisco Penaloza]

network speed is more complicated than just the way you type your network address. I know sometimes is better to have your address the way you mentioned (\\xservex\cgiwork\job folder) but your speed may vary for many other factors, such router or switcher, hard rive type and configuration, server speed and memory, firewalls etc.

[Zdravko Barisic]

Try this

http://www.hotteapot.eu/index1.html

you have some trial time, so, just download and check if it works, no need for paying.

Cheers!