(Not Responding)

[whitebirchstudios]

There has to be a reason! I spend my day waiting hours, for what seems like for nothing. I unhide things and wait for about 20 minutes. I'll do something like turn off a layer and wait... move something in the scene and wait. Other times, there is no waiting time at all. The spinning circle and (Not Responding) will sit there for about 20 minutes and MAX will free up to work again. Obviously, someone can't be productive working like this. 128Gb of RAM, a 24Gb Titan graphics care, 72 cores... so the resources are there. 

There has to be a reason!

[Anamorphic_DA]

This is my main issue with max and there is no 100% solution but there are some things you can do;

1. Proxy as much as you can (cars, people, plants etc..) and set it to display at a lower resolution in the viewport

2. Reduce the display size of textures in the viewport under Preferences

3. I find using Standard as the display mode to be quicker

4. Xref geometry into the scene where possible

5. Its possible there is a problematic piece of geometry in the scene, the only way to identify it is to systematically remove geometry until the Not Responding goes away

6. You could try merging everything into a new scene but I have found that this doesn't work as well as it used to

7. Some people may suggest deleting the ini file and that the issue can be related to max searching for plugins/bitmaps etc.. have a look online for more info on these

8. The last thing I would suggest is to turn off the auto refresh of the materials especially if you are using Slate.

Hopefully this helps and I feel your pain.

[CiroCardoso3v]

Is the file on your local pc or on a server? Could be your connection to the server that obviously has some up and downs. As soon I upgraded my network card a lot of those issues went away.

[whitebirchstudios]

The model and all its textures are local. I follow a lot of rules to keep my models clean, so I have practiced everything on your list. I just deleted my ENU last week, which I have to do almost every month.

[Anamorphic_DA]

Did you try changing from User Defined to Standard for the viewport display?

If you have geometry which has alot of Copies which are instanced, try merging them to one editable poly.

How big is your max file?

[CiroCardoso3v]

In that case you may want to run a couple of scripts to clean trash from your scene. For example, animation layers tend to be one of the things that really slow down. We use SINI Forensic that does a good job. I do believe that is free.

[whitebirchstudios]

I usually always work in Standard. I was working on a site plan and using a blueprint to model over, so I had it on High Quality. 

[Anamorphic_DA]

How big is your max file? What is your autosave duration set to and do you have compression set when max is saving?

[whitebirchstudios]

The file is large, 2.3Gb, but it even happens on much smaller models. I use Forensics on every project. I am set to save every 30 minutes, and it wasn't saving. I am not sure if it is compressing; I'll check that.

[Anamorphic_DA]

If it's 2.3Gb I would assume you have compression turned off and there is scope to proxy and xref alot of the geometry.

In this situation I would save out the cars, people, plants etc.. merge them together as individual items, proxy them and bring them back in as Xrefed scenes. I don't like my max file to be over 100mb, a hangover from max 2014 which would crash when saving and corrupt the file.