Chaos Corona Forum
Chaos Corona for 3ds Max => [Max] Bug Reporting => [Max] Resolved Bugs => Topic started by: pokoy on 2015-01-19, 11:03:56
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Build 2015-01-19, max 2014, win7
I have made some benchmarks on a scene with 25 mills polys and around 250 unique materials. Note: the numbers represent what I am experiencing since around September/October, the sluggish material editor rendering reported for the same build iin the Daily Builds thread are probably a different issue (maybe max version).
Times for opening the material editor with 24 samples:
- MatEd preview quality 1 - 65 seconds
- MatEd preview quality 3 - 68 seconds
- MatEd preview quality 5 - 71 seconds
So preview quality has only a really minimal time penalty, the material editor in general is just slow. Since this used to be way better with build before September, I think something went wrong along the way.
Some more testing:
On a clean scene, it renders very fast (unlike the other reports mentioned above).
Once a large model is imported that carries a lot of materials (20+ mills polys, approx. 200 materials), material editor rendering crawls. A simple color change on an unused and material (bare CoronaMtl, no maps used) takes 4 seconds for the update in the material editor (!). Let's face it, it is unworkable.
If I delete all materials from the model - so there are no materials in the scene but the geometry remains the same - material editor rendering goes back to almost normal, it seems to be only a tad slower.
From this behavior it's quite clear that the number of materials in the scene affects material editor rendering. I'd like to hear how it behaves for other with fairly large scenes and a large number of materials.
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Yes, as Ondra know, I had the same exact problem in my last working files. Very big, with a lot of material.
Try this: collapse the meshes in one, two or three big mesh and see what will happen.
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I really can't this would take me hours on this model.
Did you try? I'd think it produces a Multi/SubMtl with lots of submaterials, will it get better then? Did it work for you?
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Can you upload me the scene?
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Unfortunately not, I know how much easier it would be for you to track this down.
I think it may be possible to quickly generate few thousand objects with 300 unique materials assigned, unfortunately that's beyond my skills. But I think it might trigger the issue without the need for the production scene.
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ok, can you try to generate it? I was never able to get such slowdown in any of my (syntetic or real) scenes
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I really can't this would take me hours on this model.
Did you try? I'd think it produces a Multi/SubMtl with lots of submaterials, will it get better then? Did it work for you?
Yes, I have tons of books, with high quality textures.
Just attach the books. So, I had one big mesh with one big multi-sub object material.
I saw immediately a better performance in the MEdit. Ok, not fast as I wanted, but usable.
I suggest you my RAW solution just as a "TEST". To see if it could help you. =)
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ok, can you try to generate it? I was never able to get such slowdown in any of my (syntetic or real) scenes
Bummer, as I said it's above my mxs skills... If it helps, the materials are mostly BlendMtl, that might be part of the problem.
Cecofuli, can you maybe help out and provide Keymaster a scene with the books?
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ok, any scene where the problem happens would be appreciated.
Are you using interactive or not? Are the materials simple ones? Is the CPU at 100% or not during most of that time?
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The complete scene is 550 MB+ 1 Gb Proxy and textures! I have to clean the scene. But, after that, I don't know if the problem will exist again.
Unfortunately, today I'm very busy! But I'll try
About your questions, Ondra, I'll answer you as soon as I can!
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It has nothing to do with IR whatsoever, it's the general MatEd rendering.
Materials are fairly complicated, yes. Let's say every material uses 3-4 procedurals, I have around 50 textures ranging from midres to highres, most of these materials are nested within BlendMtls.
You could say 'no wonder it's slow with that heavy material setup', but it was a lot better in the past and got worse and worse with each build since around September when the first IR iterations surfaced in the daily builds.
As for CPU usage, some dailies rendered the MatEd with 3-5% (that's one core on my PC), some where going up to 90-100%, the latest uses approx 5%.
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My issues with latest daily builds (from January), but which I compare against 7.1 and SOA Special build from October, because I didn't use any between are absolutely abysmall.
It has nothing to do with scene or material, the Corona Material editor itself is extremely slow/laggy in my 2015 3dsMax. Even the most basic material lags in newly open scene without any geometry at all.
I am pretty sure it has nothing to do with 3dsMax itself, because Vray3 stays completely fluent, which is why I had to convert my current commercial project to it (which makes me really unhappy because this is interior...).
To reproduce it, all I have to do, is open 3dsMax, open Basic Material editor (kept with default Vray mats), Switch renderer to Corona, and bum....wait for 50 seconds ? Then switch any of that material to CoronaMTL, any wait few seconds for any touching of anything.
It happens on all 3 workstations.
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I attach screenshot of performance, I am doing nothing else in meantime, just staring at it, and it goes from 10 to 100perc. and back, 3dsMax frozen.
THE same happens when I simply switch materials to Corona, another 50+ seconds of freezed 3dsMax.
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A simple color change on an unused and material (bare CoronaMtl, no maps used) takes 4 seconds for the update in the material editor (!). Let's face it, it is unworkable.
Exactly. Which makes me wonder if anyone is actually using these daily build for something ? Or actual commercial work ? There is no way to work with this at all. This can't be some random error on my part.
Some UI stuff is least of my issues.
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As it is now, shading a large scene is a major pain. I am facing shading of a huge scene in 4 weeks and I'm not sure how I'm going to accomplish this.
For me, certain things introduced in the daily builds (GGX and IR in particular) are a must have so reverting to 7.1 isn't really an option. I certainly hope it gets some attention now and can be resolved, fingers crossed...
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OK, uninstalled it all and installed 7.2.
ZERO issues, everything is 100times (even more actually faster), converstion takes 1/10 of second, everything is real-time and fluent.
So what gives ? Like how could this go for whole month ? Is no one here using 2015 and Daily build to do anything ?
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I´m using 2015 with sp3 and daily builds.
I´m currently using build 2015-01-18 and it has gotten like 5% better since before.
However since I started using daily builds the material editor performance has slowed down a lot! From 100% speed to about 15%...
3ds max also freezes a and is extremely slow when using slate material editor with a lot of both simple and more complex materials, almost unusable. Sometimes I have to wait up to 10 minutes before 3ds max responds again when fixing materials.
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I am going to test now the rendering speed, since the mat editor showed such drastic difference (100times faster is understatment), I have a feeling the slow rendering times I got in recent past were all due to this as well.
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My reports date back to October and since it was limited to scenes with high material count I might have been only one of a few who noticed at all. Now it may get some traction if it occurs on max 2015 without any content in the scene.
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I didn't notice anything in simple scenes but there is indeed something wrong. Simple scenes are fast and fine, bigger scenes take considerable time to load the mtl editor slots (2, 3 secs each). But it's definitely not "heavier" materials. If I try to edit some complex materials it takes 2 or 3 secs to update but it takes exactly the same amount of time to edit a fresh CoronaMtl or StandardMtl. It's like it tries to re-evaluate all materials on all objects and updates everytime I change something.
I just made a scene with 10k boxes and 1 CoronaMtl, it shows this behavior. Scene (2014) is attached. Default scanline updates mtls instantly, as soon as you switch to Corona it's slow.
(funfact: something like that happend with the "new" slate material/map browser for a long time, and probably still does to some extend. It took 20 minutes to make a new material when you had 40k boxes with 1 mtl instance applied to all in the scene. Old mtl browser did it instantly)
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I will look if some computer still has 2014 installed and test if that exhibited similar behaviour as 2015.
But 2015 + 7.2 = Fantastic
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I tested both 2014 and 2015 (fresh, only corona) and it behaves similar.
Try the box scene I attached in my previous post :)
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I think it's redundant, since I have the issue even without any box at all and no materials.
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Guys, thanks for giving this some attention. I have been hitting a wall on this for a while already.
Now, it's strange how much our tests differ. In my case it's clearly the number of present materials, not geometry or object count. I wonder if it has to do with CPUs and threading and in general (I'm on a Dual Xeon machine) but it's good to have some broader testing now.
To emphasize that it's a daily build thing only, I didn't have this issue back then when using Alpha 7, but didn't see the problem when I went with the daily builds back in September. It got gradually worse when IR was introduced in the dailies and threading was generally a problem with IR.
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I checked only workstation we work on (4930k), but now that you mention it, I will check Xeons.
Edit: OK, the Dual-Xeon (but also Ivy-Bridge based v2), has none of those issues in freshly opened scene. Daily build.
What the hell gives... ?
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Ondra needs a scene where he can see what happens, it happens with 10k boxes, no one else provided a scene so far, so.. no, I don't think it's redundant.
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Ondra needs a scene where he can see what happens, it happens with 10k boxes, no one else provided a scene so far, so.. no, I don't think it's redundant.
Sorry for misunderstanding, I only meant me :- ). Since I have the issue without any particular scene at all. And now, it differs per CPU.
But I will try your scene now on Xeon.
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Well.
Your scene (10k) makes everything rather slow on every computer, irregardless of Daily build or 7.2. (from 4930k to dual-xeons)
Even scanline material behaves slower and lags, but it's different behaviour (not that super slow) than what I had with daily build.
Edit: It's slow even when switching to Vray or Scanline. I think your scene mostly proves 3dsMax goes to crawl when "selecting" too many objects (or even having them?). The moment I deselect those 10k boxes, I don't have any as many issues with any renderers (apart from daily build, which is allways, no matter what conditions).
Example:
Dual-Xeon Daily build: no issue anywhere in clean scene, can't even properly open the scene, just freezes forever, or opens...occasionally before going to freeze. Even the viewport has issue (but I am going through remote control).
4930k Daily build : issues persists in clean scene as well (but only while Corona is active) , 10k scene has similar issues as Xeon above
4930k 7.2 : in clean scene no issues, in 10k scene still slow (with all renderes), but not even close to issues of above.
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Yes, it's always slower (it has to update viewport colors for example), but this here is different:
- Create a teapot, isolate selection (so no boxes have to be redrawn in vp)
- try changing a property of the corona material AND one of the material right of it (specular amount for example)
- now switch Material editor renderer to Scanline and try again. Scanline will update the non-assigned material instantly, Corona will be as slow as with the assigned one.
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I checked only workstation we work on (4930k), but now that you mention it, I will check Xeons.
Edit: OK, the Dual-Xeon (but also Ivy-Bridge based v2), has none of those issues in freshly opened scene. Daily build.
What the hell gives... ?
Ha! That's odd but might help to get an idea what's causing it.
My setup is a dual 2650v2.
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My 3ds max also freezes(besides slow material preview rendering), for about 10-15 minutes, when I have the slate material opened without using it. I´m also on a dual xeon setup, dual 2697 v3.
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Deadclown, what CPU and 3dsMax(&servicepack) are you using ?
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My test with the 10kBoxes.max:
MatEd Scanline = under 1 sec.
MatEd Corona = 13 sec.
Still faster than my 60 sec wait for my production scenes.
DeadClown, could you script a setup where you create 300 unique CoronaMtl (with unique names maybe) and assign them to the boxes, but in a way so that every box gets a material from the 300 mtls pool? I'd like to compare that setup one against the one you already posted.
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Deadclown, what CPU and 3dsMax(&servicepack) are you using ?
Dual Xeon E5520, max 2014 with sp5, max 2015 with sp3
DeadClown, could you script a setup where you create 300 unique CoronaMtl (with unique names maybe) and assign them to the boxes, but in a way so that every box gets a material from the 300 mtls pool? I'd like to compare that setup one against the one you already posted.
(
numBoxes = 10000
mtls = for i = 1 to 300 collect CoronaMtl name:("TestCrn_" + i as string)
cnt = 1
for i = 1 to numBoxes do(
if cnt == 301 then cnt = 1
mb = box()
mb.material = mtls[cnt]
cnt += 1
)
)
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Thanks for the script!
My tests with the script:
10k boxes, 300 materials:
MatEd Scanline - under 1 sec.
Mat Ed Corona - ~14 sec
10k boxes, 600 materials:
MatEd Scanline - under 1 sec.
Mat Ed Corona - ~15 sec
Benchmark done manually, so it is not accurate.
It seems the number of materials has a small impact only.
I'm still not seeing the issue I had with the production scene, so I guess material complexity plays a big role in the slowdown, too.
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Fixed. It was a matter of 5 minutes with the right scene.
For the love of god, why are you reporting it only now?! I mean, reporting specific times and providing nice scene for testing, not saying "I think material editor is now slower" This could have been fixed month ago
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Fixed. It was a matter of 5 minutes with the right scene.
For the love of god, why are you reporting it only now?! I mean, reporting specific times and providing nice scene for testing, not saying "I think material editor is now slower" This could have been fixed month ago
My bad :)
My take is that it has to do with all kinds of reports going into one thread and being overlooked fairly quickly without being picked up by the community. I'm afraid that if no one else would've stumbled upon the same issue it would've remained overlooked regardless of how well I would have backed it up.
Thanks for fixing this, can't wait to test the fix.
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yes, that is possible. This only highlights 2 very important rules:
1) EACH BUG REPORT IN SEPARATE THREAD
2) ALWAYS INCLUDE SCENE
;)
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I don't hold my breath yet, but looking forward to fixed daily to check. I don't think the scene illustrated the issue so well because I had it without any geo at all, at one type of CPU, and not the other.
The fact that issues aren't reported lead me to that perhaps not enough testers are doing anything much and most people still use 7.2 for commercial work ? Or perhaps the breadth of platforms isn't that broad (3dsMax versions, Windows versions, CPU types,etc..).
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I get it!
Honestly, I'm happy if it's resolved. Also would like to test the fix on some heavy scenes.
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updated daily is up, you can try it out.
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I don't know how many daily-build testers have scenes which are that kind of "big". I didn't notice until I read the thread and made the box scene. Smaller scenes (what I usually do these days with Corona) worked fine.
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I confirm that the issue is solved with the newest build (Jan 19 2015 17:19:26).
Both the 10kBoxes scene and some of my production scenes now work like they used to before.
Keymaster, you made a man happy today. Thanks!
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Why is it resolved ? Because it solved single case ?
It's faster, but not even close as fast as 7.2, which I just ugpraded to latest build. I attach screenshot on what happens in freshly opened (No geometry at all), scene. 50 second freeze became 20 second freeze. 7.2 did it under one second.
The materials themselves do provide feedback much faster, without such noticeable delay, but I wouldn't call it ideal.
I would much rather this to keep as consistent existing thread.
I was able to reproduce the slowness on 3 different 4930k i7 builds. Dual-Xeon 2680v2 doesn't exhibit it, and runs smoothly. They both run Windows 8.1, 3dsMax 2015 SP 2 and latest daily build.
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For me the MatEd displays materials instantly now, even on the heavy scenes it's quite fast.
Now I wonder if max 2015 is part of the problem. Can you test the same build with 2014?
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For me the MatEd displays materials instantly now, even on the heavy scenes it's quite fast.
Now I wonder if max 2015 is part of the problem. Can you test the same build with 2014?
I don't have one...
The behaviour is much better, I give it that. But it used to be vastly better, which I can still see comparing 4930k and the Dual-Xeon. Or 7.2 in general to daily build under 4930k.
Will do some further testing.
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can you send me your scene? I See it is not default/empty since it renders everything as unsupported materials
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It's default Vray 3.10.02. I wondered for moment if it struggles perhaps because it's unknown to it.
Thanks for idea, I will start the default with MentalRay, to see if it behaves differently.
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Latest daily build 19-01 : 13 secs loading materials (hit "M" and chrono).
Daily build from 16-01 : 13 secs loading materials
Public 7.2 : 13 secs loading materials.
No issues here... (or not complex enough materials).
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13 seconds would be still the 'slow' mode, depending on your system of course.
With the latest 'fixed' build the material editor renders in ~2 seconds here, not much slower that scanline.
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Ok it's fast enough for me. On regular heavy scene, it seems to work as expected.
Now to see if I will switch my commercial stuff back to Corona(I went from Corona to Vray because I had one day to make preview). This left me bit paranoid about potential issues along way.
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With the new daily build it´s much faster, but I´m still getting a couple of second of freezing with the material editor..
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Update:
Example: A multi/sub-object material with 4 rather basic materials freezes 3d max for about 10 seconds before it starts to render the previews.
I only have that material and 5 other very simple materials in the slate material editor.
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ahem...
2) ALWAYS INCLUDE SCENE
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ahem...
2) ALWAYS INCLUDE SCENE
Sorry! :) I will try to create a scene with the same problem, I can´t send the scene I´m working with now.
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I don't know how many daily-build testers have scenes which are that kind of "big". I didn't notice until I read the thread and made the box scene.
I have a scene with 12+ million polygons (i think, it's on a different PC), not counting the proxies, and dozens of materials, and i keep them all in material editor! Haven't noticed any lag. Max 2014 though.