Author Topic: Serious MAX freezes while using slate material editor  (Read 8846 times)

2021-02-17, 18:22:33

Ink Visual

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Hi,
In some of our files slate material editor is often freezing 3ds max for 3 minutes or so.
Opening the slate material editor itself can also last ages - 3-5mins.
Editing simple materials and applying them to objects in the scene can also cause lag, or freeze max completely.
This however does not happen with compact material editor, files are perfectly usable while using it.

Anticipating questions,
-this happens even if material editor is cleaned of all the materials.
-merging all the objects to the new scene does not help.
-merging files in groups to identify the problem didn't give us much of a success,
we think the issue might be associated with some scatters/proxies/shaders brought from the older scenes that were using older Corona versions,
but we could no identify particular cause of the above

We use Max 2019 (in Max 2021 problem is still present), Corona 6 Hotfix 1

Can you please help us to identify the problem?
I am just about to archive the scene for you as well as provide the dump file.

Thanks in advance

2021-02-18, 10:13:29
Reply #1

Maybejensen

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Following this thread. I have the same problem..
 I avoid slate as much as I can these days. Feels like it's slowing me down instead of increasing productivity.
MAYBEJENSEN I Working on something I  Ryzen 3950x / RTX 3080

2021-02-18, 11:49:27
Reply #2

pokoy

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One idea - if you are using distance maps in your scene, maybe they are being updated in the background by Slate. Make sure to *not* display scene materials in the Slate browser, maybe this helps.

There are performance issues with Windows UI scaling, too. If you are using it, see if changing it to 100% helps.

In general though, Slate is going crazy with the internal notification system and that's what is making it slow in general.
Slate's material/map browser is really slow here. I can't use Slate on our heavy assets, literally *any* change to a material which involves the Slate browser - assigning or changing maps or materials - takes minutes.
Autodesk is aware of this since quite a few years, pages of reports and discussion have been going on for a really long time. There were some attempts to improve this in 2021 and 2021.3... but still, the old material browser is much much faster.

One Autodesk dev suggested to :

-close Max
-open 'SME.ini 'located in 'C:\Users\YOUR_USERNAME\AppData\Local\Autodesk\3dsMax\2020 - 64bit\ENU\plugcfg_ln'
-change the line 'LibSceneMtlOptionFlags' from its current value to '0'

and see if it helps... in my case it made no difference whatsoever.

Like I said, the problem is not going away probably unless SME 2.0 is there. How long will this take... years, probably.

BTW, you can still use the old material browser, maybe this helps. Try it out by changing 'UseOldMtlBrowser' to '1' in the same ini file.

If you want to see a change, report it as a bug, make sure to post on the Area etc. Most rendering devs have not much experience in using Max in a production environment, or are long gone from any production role, and simply have no idea how much it slows down people and make working impossible for some.


2021-02-18, 17:28:37
Reply #4

Ink Visual

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Many thanks for all the tips Pokoy,
I do hope SME 2.0 will bring some positive change, as it seems to be becoming our day-to-day issue hugely affecting production speed.
I will try using the methods you posted links to. Some of them I have already tested, unfortunately without much of a change.

In the meantime, I have sent the problematic scene and the dump file via dropbox uploader.
Here are file names:
1789_slate_material_issue
1789_slate_material_editor_dump

My main aim however, is to identify what in particular does cause the problems I described.
Some of our scenes work just fine, even with more complicated nodes, the SME is not the fastest but we do not experience excessive lags or freezes,
The scene that I'm referring to though, is an extreme example of the file that is simply impossible to work with when SME is open.


2021-02-18, 17:50:33
Reply #5

pokoy

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Would you mind sharing this file with me, too? I would really love to inspect it and promise to delete once I have delved into it.

What max version are you using? If it's 2021, make sure to install PU3, there was some work on Slate performance afair.

2021-02-19, 09:16:44
Reply #6

rowmanns

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Hi,

Thanks for reporting this. Can I ask for your full computer specification as well?

Cheers,

Rowan
Please read this before reporting bugs: How to report issues to us!
Send me your scene!

2021-02-22, 10:15:26
Reply #7

maru

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We've had a somewhat similar case recently, and what solved the freezes was resetting the ENU folder fully:
https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/3ds-max/learn-explore/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/Resetting-3ds-Max-3ds-Max-Design.html
Maybe it's worth a try...
Marcin Miodek | chaos-corona.com
3D Support Team Lead - Corona | contact us

2022-01-25, 14:27:02
Reply #8

phantu interior

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I have this problem too, fortunately it's solved by turn the scene material to "Filter Selected Objects" and turn off the auto update.

Hope this will help! 

2022-01-25, 16:11:58
Reply #9

arqrenderz

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I have seen Slowdowns if there is any missing textures, is worth the check.

2022-08-26, 18:44:30
Reply #10

CharlyRT

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I have this problem too, fortunately it's solved by turn the scene material to "Filter Selected Objects" and turn off the auto update.

Hope this will help!

Thank u so much!!!! This partially helped me out with a recent project on Max 2021 :) on Max 2020 its not working :(

Update: Finally we solve the issue, it was something about geometry, we split the whole project in sections and a coworker did a something rare, collapsing everything and attach solved everything, it wasnt anything about SME, Graphics Card nor PC Hardware/Software, just collapse everything. hope this could help someone else.
« Last Edit: 2022-08-27, 00:22:04 by RTstudio »

2022-08-30, 15:30:36
Reply #11

Ink Visual

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Yeah, Max handles the individual instances/copies of objects terribly if there are thousands of them in the viewport.
If only you attach them all together, all of a sudden all works fine.
But it makes it almost impossible to work with models imported from Sketchup, Blender etc that usually contain hundreds of thousands individual elements for larger scenes.

2022-08-30, 17:06:40
Reply #12

CharlyRT

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The strangest thing is, why is this only afecting the Slate Material Editor, like u said, the common thing could be related to the viewport, but in my case, the whole scene could be manage perfectly fine, but opening the SME took a lot of time and even max stopped working. Another thing is that max 2020 couldnt handle the groups, but this has been resolve in max 2021 at least on this project that we are working on.