topic Re: 3dsmax 2023 - Material editor lagging, slow responses in 3ds Max Forum

3dsmax 2023 - Material editor lagging, slow responses

krawczakjakub1 — Sat, 13 Aug 2022 14:52:36 GMT

Hi,
I've recently migrated to 3dsmax 2023 and whenever I want to change some material parameters the material editor gets really laggy. I have to wait a few seconds even to just change the material roughness, plug a new map etc. I literally cant do anything with materials wihout a slight lagging. The autopreview also slowed down. It doesnt matter whether I use slate material editor or the compact one. Still lagging, I cant precisely use slider to change amout of reflection, translucency etc.
Whenever I change any parameter there's an info on the bottom of my screen saying that the material is rendering and it takes a while. I attaches screenshot. Even with empty, new scene. Even with plain material with no maps at all. Physical material, corona material, vray mtl - nothing changes, still lags. Restoring factory setting did not help

Any ideas?

Re: 3dsmax 2023 - Material editor lagging, slow responses

BenBisares — Tue, 16 Aug 2022 03:11:20 GMT

I see in your screenshots that it's trying to render a Corona material. Perhaps the current Material Editor renderer does not like rendering them. I try changing the Material Editor renderer to something else and test.

Re: 3dsmax 2023 - Material editor lagging, slow responses

krawczakjakub1 — Thu, 18 Aug 2022 10:07:52 GMT

I am indeed using corona and corona materials. Unfortunalety changing both assigned renderer and material editor didint help 😞 Any other ideas?

Re: 3dsmax 2023 - Material editor lagging, slow responses

harun.yigit — Sat, 27 Aug 2022 13:46:52 GMT

I have that same problem. The computer freezes completely for a few seconds. I use physical material. When I use any map, it is not possible to adjust its settings.

Re: 3dsmax 2023 - Material editor lagging, slow responses

tim_laird — Thu, 30 Mar 2023 13:07:36 GMT

We have it here, and it's been like it since Arnold got dumped into 3ds. The only speedy materials are the Standard shaders and with scanline turned on.

Mental Ray was a little slower than Scanline, but Arnold REALLY knocks it out of the park in terms of minimising usability. I presume it's the same with other 3rd party renderers too, so Corona etc.

One way to side-step the laggy material editor is to use the Activeshade window with Arnold, this stops the material editor swatches from rendering at all... but it means you have to suffer the lag of the Activeshade Arnold window instead 🙂

Turning off auto-update on the slots also sort of works, but when you create a new Multi-material, it will spend a good 3 minutes updating every swatch for the 10 materials, before giving you a chance to even interact with the editor.

Weird how Autodesk didn't mention this 50% less productivity in their release material

Re: 3dsmax 2023 - Material editor lagging, slow responses

Donald.Newlands — Thu, 14 Sep 2023 17:38:19 GMT

I'm having the same problem with Vray in 2023... The material editor can hang for 10 minutes or more processing the "RenderQueue" (lower left corner of ME dialog). It is rendering things that I'm not even using in my scene, like Ink and Paint, Morpher and Matte Shadow materials. There doesn't seem to be a way to escape out of it except doom scrolling national news... 😉 I will test turning on the manual update option in ME next, but this seems like a real bug.

Re: 3dsmax 2023 - Material editor lagging, slow responses

it — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 12:35:32 GMT

I just tested Renderams tips on deleting the temp-folder. Now my UI and Slate Material Editor is fast again.

https://youtu.be/wdWVLr5x9tg?si=GIiE7-iSTHv1IF7T

Re: 3dsmax 2023 - Material editor lagging, slow responses

Casey_H_ — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 16:50:59 GMT

I've noticed this sometimes (Max 2025 + VRay 7) and, for me, it happens when system ram has high usage. With 128GB ram it takes having multiple apps running, like 3DS Max, Illustrator, Photoshop, EnView (big mem hog!), Acrobat, Image Viewer, Edge (w/ at least 10 tabs), WinAmp, Teams. Closing some doesn't typically help, and neither does restarting Max by itself. Only a reboot brings it back to normal, which also clears the temp folder, so that would go along with the tip above.

I will try clearing the temp folder without restart next time. Thanks for the info.