Viewport Performance drop once something is rendered or Material-editor is used.

[JG_monomiru]

well back again on trying to resolve this.
I tried max 2017 and daily build 160918 ... i also deinstalled all mscv c++ versions except the 64bit 2015 ... still if i start rendering or open material editor, the scene/or viewport becomes very laggy/unusable.

I'm nut sure how to solve this - sending a max-file is probably not really helping, since the same file is behaving in max2016 with corona 1.3 very fine after material editor was opened. The only solution i can see now is to reinstall the whole machine with clean win10 and install only latest versions. But i'm not sure if that will help it.

[Juraj]

I installed trial of 2017 3 days ago and daily, and had the same behaviour as you describe.

Super odd, because at same time, 2016 and same daily, on same computer had none of those issues.

It's weird and reoccuring issue, but definitely tied to mat editor.

[maru]

I (finally!) experienced the slow material editor recently. Everything was always working fine for me, but then I had some completely different problems with Max, so I uninstalled all MSVC++ versions, and then re-installed them one by one (proceeding exactly according to this Autodesk guide: https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/autocad/troubleshooting/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/How-to-remove-and-reinstall-Microsoft-Visual-C-Runtime-Libraries.html), then I opened 3ds Max and... material editor was super slow. So I opened Windows Update, and noticed that there was no update on my PC since 2015 (oops). So I installed all available Windows Updates (required a few restarts and manually installing this https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=53332 since my Windows Update was stuck on "searching for updates") and... the material editor runs super smooth again!

So it looks like basically Windows updates and MSVC++ do shit to system.

[JG_monomiru]

Well since I use windows10 I'm sure it is also up-to-date...
So it might be something else - but I'll check on uninstalling C++ again and reinstalling latest C++ distributable.

[Dionysios.TS]

Great! Good to hear you found the reason of the slow downs!!!! :)

[Juraj]

My Windows10 is always up to day. It's Stockholm syndrome, Microsoft did so much bruteforce updating methods I gave up and adopted new OCD pleasure to my arsenal: checking for updates and feeling 'clean' afterwards : /

[JG_monomiru]

well even with latest windows update and C++ redistributale reduced to the latest 2015 version... it still slows down when opening scenes and their material editor (with some network path textures) ....
which seems odd when this slow down is still "on" even if mat-editor or frame-buffer is closed. maybe i'm stuck with using corona 1.3 for now :(

you need to close 3dsmax and reopen it to work in the scene again...until you do some sort of rendering.

[cecofuli]

https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php/topic,12975.msg83928.html#msg83928

Is this your problem? Like in my videos?

[JG_monomiru]

yes kind of... it seems that the whole UI of max gets laggy after some sort of rendering was started.

[peterguthrie]

I *think* we are having the same issues here with max 2017. At least on one machine. Going to try the uninstall all visual c++ thing and see if it helps

[JG_monomiru]

well i did some more testing - I'm not sure what is the real solution. The C++ Stuff didn't worked for me so far.
I discovered that completely new scenes with an empty material editor doesn't cause the slowdown.

So i merged my usual conflicted Scene into a new Max-Scene and only added my usual MultiSub-Material from the old scene into the Mat-Editor.

It doesn't SlowDown so far.

Usually i kept an VrayHDRI Map i used to light the Scene in one of the Slots of the Material Editor - and sure it takes a time to load, but didn't caused Problems before (with corona 1.3). I'm not sure, this time i haven't loaded it into a slot and Max behaves as it should be...

I don't know if this might trigger the Slowdown or if something else within the old Scene messed up.

[JG_monomiru]

I did some more research - thanks to corona support.
It seems the UI slowdown is somehow present when "corona-bitmap" is used and textures are stored on network.
Funny thing is there are 2 kinds of slow-downs - one the material-editor is slow and the other is whole 3dsmax UI/zooming/panning is sluggish or nearly unusable.

The first - material editor slow down - is present when standard bitmaps are used and probably loaded while rendering the previews. If "corona-bitmap" are used within materials the whole material-editor is quite faster in "rendering the preview slots"

The latter - ui slow down - is present when used "corona-bitmap" with network shared textures (probabpy if there are many many textures used) the scene/3dsmax instance becomes very sluggish/slow and hard to work with. Actually it feels like using a new windows version on a pre 2000 computer.

Since i might be the only one having this issue - there could be also different reasons triggering this effect - but for now this works for me: use less of corona-bitmap and use standard bitmaps and accept that the material-editor might be slow when loading lots of multisubmaterials with lots of network shared textures. At least the Scene/UI handling of 3dsmax is not horrible then.

[pokoy]

Are you using Slate as material editor and the new material/map browser maybe?

Could you please test one thing (make sure Max is not running): locate the file 'SME.ini' (in you user account, path should be something like C:\Users\USER\AppData\Local\Autodesk\3dsMax\2016 - 64bit\ENU\plugcfg_ln) and change

UseOldMtlBrowser=0
to
UseOldMtlBrowser=1

Now start Max, make sure you don't open Slate and only use Classic mat-ed for this test, open a scene where you're experiencing lags. Does it still lag for you?

The new slate material browser caused all kinds of problems for me (laggy Max, material browser taking ages to open etc.) and the first thing I do with a new Max install is to make sure I'm using the old browser. Slate may run in the background to render material icons and can heavily slow down Max or even cause it to hang, like it did for me in the past.

[JG_monomiru]

Actually i use mainly the classic material editor with 9 slots. Maybe sometimes i switch to slate and in older Scenes there are some "Material View Tabs" still present while not used on objects.

I tried switching to classic material browser - it seems it has no effect on the described problems.

When using corona-bitmaps the UI still feels sluggish and its hard work with 3dsmax (doesnt matter which shading mode is used - also slow in wireframe-mode) - still material-editor opens quite fast - compared to std. bitmap.

When using only standard bitmaps the UI is fast in 3dsmax and material-editor is kind of slow loading all textures to render slot-previews. But this might be a network issue (even if its gbps network loading files are from within max between 10 to 80 MBit/s).
But this slow material-editor is only slowed down by rendering the preview-slots. It was also slow with the new material-browser - and needed constant rerendering of preview-slots. With classic-material-browser it gained some speeds - once you work within material editor. So thanks for that tip again!

[pokoy]

Thanks for testing, I'm always interested how it works for others. As I said, I have scenes (those with hundreds of materials) where the Slate material browser won't come up even after 10 mins. From talks with Autodesk they're not aware of this problem. IIRC there's a bug in one of the recent Max versions where disabling material preview rendering will not have any effect and they'll render in the background nonetheless. The old browser has some features that Slate doesn't so it's better to use the old one either way.

Corona Bitmap is slow to respond here, too, and it's completely useless in IR mode that way, I can confirm that one.