Importing huge 3d scenes into 3dmax

[Niels Sinke]

Hello,

I am having a hard time importing a 3d model for a client and needed some extra help so i thought to post my question here hopeing for some advice from you guys/girls.

I need to import a very big scene and make it workable. The original file is from navisworks and i found i could export the scene as fbx but the fbx file zise became 1.9gb in size. I triend importing it into 3dmax and at first i thought it got stuck but then i just let it run overnight in the weekend and i think somewhere in the time frame of a whole weekend it finished and imported. I was able to save the file as max file and the file size is almost 6gb uncompressed and  357mb compressed. 

Problem is that working with it is impossible. every click takes ages or it just stops responding. 

I need to get this file working so i went to try a different aprouch. I exported the original file in parts as a test from navisworks but it is hard to know what parts you have imported correctly or what parts may be missing or are incorrect. 

My question is are there any people with experience regarding importing huge 3d data into 3dmax or are there any third party software that help with this? I know about pixyz studio which i just started a demo version. Hope this gives results but nevertheless my question remains.

Hope you guys can give me some advice.

Kind regards

Niels

[Francisco Penaloza]

Well this may be a late reply but for what is worth. There are a few similar post in this forum, you may need to search about large file or 3D S Max large scenes etc.

I do work with large projects, but most of them comes from REVIT, but is about the same.  The main point you should know is 3DS Max do not like many objects with a few Polygons, it is always better to have fewer objects with lots of Polygons. Having said this there should be common seance using this method also so you won't merge everything in to a single object.

My workflow usually divided Site, Surrounding buildings, Main building, Interior furniture, cars people, landscaping and so on.  Depending on the project we also separate the one project in different Max files because we are only rendering images, so we don't need to have everything for interiors or similar shots. This same approach works for animations.

You can export in parts, and then create separate 3D Max files, and then link all those files in tot a single master file, You can XREF objects or parts of your scene, for instance if it is a neighborhood, you could proxy each house or make them XREF each one of them and link them in to a master file.

Other thing that can help is if there is a object, furniture or mechanic piece that repeats, you can only import it once and clone it inside 3D Max, this also save memory because 3DsMax will read it as an instance instead several objects.  You could export the one object, then replace all those copies in navisworks with boxes, then you can use the clone and replace option in 3D Max to replace all those boxes with your copy of the object. You only want the location and rotation of that object and you replace it with your proxy or cloned object.

There are other method but with this steps you'll see a big improvement in performance.

Before I forget, try to place your objects close to the 0,0,0 coordinate in 3D Max, and if you are working with large shot, city like you may want to adjust your units to Meters or Feet instead of Milliliters or inches, this help with the viewport quality.

 

[Stefan Hähnlein]

there are a few things which could be the reason for a slow file:

- too many objects (I would say above 10,000 objects it is getting slow and that is not easy to fix)

- too many layers and nested layers in scene manager (that is fixable)

- old 3ds max version (max 2023 is newest and probably fastest)

- too many hirarchies whith hirarchies

I hope that helps...