VERY slow loading of scenes

[thinkbdw]

Hi People,

This is going to be a long post but I want to get the problem we are having explained clearly.

We have recently moved offices and now have our own dedicated server which we do not share with the rest of the company which is great but since then our files take an incredibly long time to load.

We are using 3ds Max 2014 and Vray 2.4

We are an Arch Viz company which we work on a number of types of projects from static images to animations. File sizes can vary from 50mb to 300mb (at least.) We can have a varied amount of textures in our scenes which also include Vray Proxies and xrefed files.

I have a strong belief it is to do with our new server and the IP / Network address it uses. I will now explain the two ways we have had the servers set up:

Old Network:

We had two mapped drives one with our job folders with our max files in and another with all our resources in.

The address we used to connect to the server for our jobs as a mapped drives was \\xservex\cgiwork\job folder

The address we used to connect to the server for our resources as a mapped drive was\\xservex\cgiresources

Now obviously the larger the scenes the longer they took to load and there was a very large amount of files to go through. We also shared this with the artwork department who were all on iMacs and used Quark.

New Server (what we are having issues with):

Again we have a server with two mapped drives with our max files and another with our resources in.

The address we used to connect to the server for our jobs as a mapped drives is \\10.xxx.xx.xxx\cgiwork\job folder

The address we used to connect to the server for our resources as a mapped drive is \\10.xxx.xx.xx\cgiresources

As you can see the difference between the two is that they are now using IP address to map the drive rather than xservex.

When we open up files (obviously speed changes on file size) they take at long time to open, sometimes 20mins. The scenes still contain the same resources and xrefs.

The way around this is we disconnect while the file is loading. We have to be careful how quickly we do this as proxies have to be completley loaded. When we disconnect the scene and it opens you can see that it has loaded some of the textures but now all of them as they are just the colour of the object.

If we open the material editor it will also take a very long time unless we disconnect. The previews will sometimes be black as they have not loaded but just going into the map and reloading it the texture appears.

Now none of thesse problems were here before and I think it is to do with the changes to the address changing from text xservex to an IP number.

Can anyone help?

If I need to go into more deails just ask.

Andrew

[michaelfce]

i just wanted to bring this topic back to the front because we have the same issue and no solution yet... any news on this?!

(i have for example a 350mb max file wich takes 20min to load)

[Anonymous]

I know this thread is a little bit old and the original poster might not need the answer anymore but my response might help other people with a similar problem.

Short answer (for those TL;DR guys out there):
Non existing network paths is the problem here. Solution is to re-link the assets by a script before opening a .max file.

Here the proper answer:
I can't tell exactly who is the culprit here, if it's 3dsmax, Windows, network card/drivers or the network itself, but the fact is that once you load a texture into your max file from a network you end up with 3dsmax checking that network path every time you open the scene. Which is correct, right? Unfortunately this becomes a problem when that network path no longer exists. For some reason it takes a long time for 3rdsmax/windows/network card to figure out that the network path doesn't exist anymore and if you have a scene file with dozens of textures then it can take 10 or more minutes to open it. I observes this varries on different setups and networks.

Anyway, the solution that I found is to re-link the network paths of assets (textures, xrefs, etc.) in the scene file before opening it by using Maxscript.  Just search for "getMAXFileAssetMetadata" and "setMAXFileAssetMetadata". I made a simple script using those functions which takes a .max file of your choosing, looks for any assets within the file with network paths and re-links those paths to local space. It's quite simple and doesn't allow much of customization (let alone error checking) so I don't dare to upload it here but if anybody's interested feel free to PM me or write me an e-mail and I'll send you the script. I use it successfuly on old files and they all load very quickly now.

[Anonymous]

hi...can u email me the script?i facing the same problem now.here is my email add: huijin94lee@gmail.com

[Anonymous]

can you send me 🙂 koridoor (at) gmail (.) com 

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@Anonymouswrote:

hi...can u email me the script?i facing the same problem now.here is my email add: huijin94lee@gmail.com

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[jon.bell]

Hi @Anonymous , @thinkbdw , @Anonymous , @Anonymous and @michaelfce ,

Just reviving this thread to see if people still needed help on this issue, and to note that we have an article outlining multiple ways to speed up 3ds Max when working across a network environment. Please let us know if this helps!

[Anonymous]

Hi @Anonymous - I know this topic is quite old now, but I’m having a similar problem. Scenes are taking forever to load. Can you send the script to me? I couldn’t send you a private message but my email is Paulcox3d at gmail. I appreciate your help! 

[jon.bell]

Hi @Anonymous ,

Thanks for your question. I wanted to note that we have an article outlining multiple ways to speed up 3ds Max when working across a network environment. Please let us know if this helps!