Any scene debugging tools/scripts out there?

[Jpjapers]

Ive been having problems recently with some larger scenes and spending hours and hours debugging them to find a specific object thats causing the issue seems to be really inefficient.
Vray seems to have some great reporting tools whereby you can see a memory breakdown of your scene on a per object basis, stage by stage.
I know we have some amount of this in the error reporter currently but i was wondering if there are any maxscripts or debug/dev tools within corona that can give a more comprehensive breakdown of whats going on under the hood?

Its all well and good having a support system to upload problematic scenes to but it would be much more helpful if there were better reporting tools out there to help us debug scenes.

Thanks

[James Vella]

have you tried sini tools (Forensic maybe)?

https://sinisoftware.com/Products

[Jpjapers]

Yeah ive tried forensic, its a great tool but not really what i need for this. Im getting really high parsing times all of a sudden on a live project and so far ive not managed to track down why. Ideally there would be a full scene memory report available from corona like the texture memory useage csv, but for materials and geometry.

[James Vella]

Ideally there would be a full scene memory report available from corona like the texture memory useage csv, but for materials and geometry.

Thats a good idea.

In the mean time I suppose the only thing I can think of is the old 50/50 way (remove 50%, hit render), do it again until the speed jumps up significantly, then you know which chunk to investigate.

Another idea which could give you more info (for geometry, and other info too), export one of those chunks as fbx (ascii not binary), then open the fbx with notepad. This will give you a tonne of info about the objects and its data but you would probably need a custom parser to get the data you want sufficiently, unless you dont mind scrolling though millions float values lol.

[arqrenderz]

Totally behind this tool, Please give more love to this idea, i been asking for it for maybe 2 years, the current memory report is TOO simple, almost worthless to debug a problematic scene..
https://chaoscorona.ideas.aha.io/ideas/CMAX-I-15

[Jpjapers]

Ideally there would be a full scene memory report available from corona like the texture memory useage csv, but for materials and geometry.

Thats a good idea.

In the mean time I suppose the only thing I can think of is the old 50/50 way (remove 50%, hit render), do it again until the speed jumps up significantly, then you know which chunk to investigate.

Another idea which could give you more info (for geometry, and other info too), export one of those chunks as fbx (ascii not binary), then open the fbx with notepad. This will give you a tonne of info about the objects and its data but you would probably need a custom parser to get the data you want sufficiently, unless you dont mind scrolling though millions float values lol.

Hmm that is an interesting idea. Sounds like something an ai might be able to code quite well too.

But yes the whole 50/50 approach is what ive ended up having to do.

[James Vella]

Hmm that is an interesting idea. Sounds like something an ai might be able to code quite well too.

Yeah, I have built a parser in the past but its not fun, lots of regex. But certainly possible with AI and testing.

Cool thing about fbx is it has so much data you can lots with it, like build a bridge between 3dsmax/c4d, or max to blender etc since all its doing is looking at the data tree and then putting it into a json file, then you can rewire it on the other end so if its using a coronacolor in software A, change it to this node in software B, then copy the values etc. Simple concept, but lots of things to take into consideration.