3D Studio Max Lag?

Anyone else get alot of lag when using 3d Studio max 7, I have not that bad a computer and am doing a fairly small scene only 5 droid ships and 1 droid controler and was wondering if anyone else had problems with this?

 

Two things:

1: MAX is a resourse eater. It will try to use all the free ram you have to speed up it's own processes. For this reason it's a good idea not to have other programs running simultaineously, as that can increase the chance of MAX crashing or being low.

2: There are settings in MAX that speed up processing time. Hiding objects and using box-reference settings speed up your calucation processes, making MAX faster.

 

Both of those models are pretty high-res too, which tends to lag any computer when working with fully-detailed models.

 

where do you turn off the details and create low poly models to work with the scene? i know you can change settings in the 'views' from 'smooth+highlights' to 'wireframe' etc.... is there another method to lighten the processing load when your laying out your animation? My computers are pretty stout and i normally have good results moving big detailed models around but i could work much faster in a low-res environment when im building. anyone? bueller?

 

If the whole ship mesh is Grouped you can open the group and "Hide" (right click the mesh -> Hide Selected) the detailed parts of the ship you don't really need. Then you can take the basic outline of the ship, copy it, down-poly further if you wish, then unhide the rest of the main ship and link that group to the low-poly mesh. Then you can hide the whole main ship and work with the low-poly ship until you need to use the main ship. Then just hide the low-poly and unhide the main ship (or you can set the low-poly ship to non-renderable.

 

On a given viewport, right click on the name of the veiw. (i.e. Perspective, Camera, Left, Right, Top, Front.....) then select Other > Bounding Box. It will take each mesh in that window and render it as a box in that view port. It does nothing to the actual renders, but makes it VERY easy to work with. It kept my system from crashing when I tried to render a raytraced shot with 100+ Storm Trooper models.

 

thanks guys!

Corrin, i see it now. i like that method and it works like a champ.

 

Also, make sure that it is in OpenGL Mode

 

That, of course, depends upon your video card and system capabilities. But definately worth a shot.

 

Ya thank you very much its not working that well for me since i added 3 republic star destroyers (or whatever) but I have a pretty old computer and appreciate the effort!!!!! all I need now is to figure out how to put in a background