Material Slate Editor slow and lags

[OccultMonk]

With each change to a material there is a significant pause sometimes 10 sec. Even changing a color is slow. The scene has many objects and hiding them improves performance a bit, but it still lags a lot. There are no real complex shades in the scene. I use Vray. In an empty /simple scene there are no problems. I already deleted the complex material shaders but there does not seem to be enough improvident. 

What can I do to speed up the slate material editor? Are there some things that slow it down? I don't want to have to wait 5-10-15 seconds after each change. 

[Anonymous]

I have a similar issue (Max 2017, mental ray)
My case is a little different. I'm using the compact material editor and when I use procedural materials, the update is very slow even if I don't have "show material in viewport" checked. Once the problem occurs, everything grinds to a halt as long as the material editor is open. This causes a big problem if I am trying to animate a material. Once I close the material editor, my viewport speed seems to go back to normal. Again, this is even if "show material in viewport" is not checked. Of course, I would always like to show material in viewport if I could. I never had problems like this in older versions of max (going back to V8). It happens even if I am using very simple things like a gradient ramp. Very frustrating!

[ipotter]

I have this exact problem - it seems to kick into overdrive once a scene has a large amount of texture assets. I am currently working on a scene containing thousands of low poly models of buildings each with there own texture map (its a photogrammetry model of a city broken up into indivdual buildings - about 15000 total buildings ) 

Opening the slate material takes about 3 minutes even if the slate is clear, render material updates is off and no materials are shown in the viewport .  Forget about actually interacting with anything, I just get the spinning blue wheel until I forget what I was trying to do. 

Only switching to the compact editor helps  - but I haven't used the compact editor for so long that I've really grown to hate it!

 Dual 24 core xeon , 128gb ram, Titan Pascal X - so my hardware isnt lacking lol! 

[hoaken12345]

I use RedShift Render.

Viewport is sluggish when the Material Editor is open/visible.

My solution:

Under "Render Setup", Assign Renderer, Material Editor, switch to another renderer then switch back to Redshift.

This seems to "refresh" the system and the viewport runs smoothly again.

Hope this helps some people.

[Anonymous]

I've the same exact problem, for me It's not related to the render engine but it's linearly connected to the number of objects in the scene. I.e.: if you create a sphere assign a simple standar material in it duplicate it with instance copy thousand of times you'll have lags when you open the slate material editor, it's seems that he build a list of the entire objects every time you open the editor. Could You please solve this issue because in production it's a really huge problem. My boss want to change 3ds Max, but I want to stay with this software 😞

[jon.bell]

Hi everyone,

Just wanted to revive this thread to see if other people were having this issue with recent copies of 3ds Max, or if we could close this for now. Please let us know, and thanks!

[darawork · Accepted solution]

I've, for one, have not had any further issues, on subsequent releases, even through remote working away from the office. 

[Anonymous]

My 2 cents: sometimes the culprit is texture size in the viewport. Go to Configure Viewports -> Display performance, and make sure that the texture maximums are low and not 6000 pixels, for example.

[ixikEEA68]

Currently testing Max 2022 + Vray 5.1 and the performance of Slate Editor is horrendous (as it has always been since 2013 on various machines I worked at 🙂 )

Current setup:

Win 10, Ryzen 5 5600H, Geforce STX 3060, 32GB RAM

The weird behaviour:

 - There is a constant lag between selecting material and a load of its properties.

 - When loading new materials into the editor, it takes unreasonably long for the preview to render

 - If a scene is loaded and slate editor has to generate a preview for all material in it, it does it at a rate of one material per ~ 2 seconds. The exact moment I click on the menu and any rollout pop up - it speeds up considerably. 
- Nitrous 11 (9) is the probable culprit, when I switch to Direct3D, the Slate Editor runs lightning-fast - the generation of previews and properties is almost instant.  (sadly Direct3D cuts off geometry in the viewports and it is not usable)