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Make Autosave Efficient

Make Autosave Efficient

When you have a heavy scene the autosave function locks up  max and interrupts your work flow. Also sometimes it starts to save when you are in the middle of a complex setup which may lead to a crash. It would be great if the auto save happened without affecting the current session of max. 

95 Comments
SuperRune
Enthusiast

I'd like to see a smarter Autosave, specifically these two things:

 

- Optionally autosave when 3ds Max have been idle for more than two minutes

- Don't keep autosaving when 3ds Max are idle for longer periods. We don't need 10 autosaves after having been gone for a meeting.

Anonymous
Not applicable

Quite a significant amount of productivity (time) is lost waiting for large .max scene files to save. If 3ds Max was able to use Background Saving in the same way that Adobe applications do, where when you hit Save the file starts writing in the background and you can still continue to use the application unhindered, this would save a massive amount of time sitting looking at a locked 3ds max waiting for large files to write.

Anonymous
Not applicable

I forgot to mention also that this would hopefully then apply to autosaving... Imagine if autosaves worked purely in the background... no need to abort it any more because it wouldn't interrupt you at all...

danny.austin
Advocate

Soooo much time!!! 5 minutes or more sometimes for very large scenes.

dgorsman
Consultant

There would need to be a way to handle timing problems i.e. if saving is going on the in the background, the user can be making changes.  Do those changes get saved, or not?  Can the contents actually be saved at the same time the user is working, or does the procedure of writing to file require full access to everything?

danny.austin
Advocate
I suppose a shadow copy could be used. Or, the changes that were made during the saving process were stored in a temp file and then applied to the next auto save.

Now there's an idea. I run a lot of incremental data backups. I wonder if it's possible to save/update only the content within the max file that has been altered/created/deleted


Anonymous
Not applicable

Use your software creatively and then you will never loose time saving.   Use XREF for heavy stuff, then you will never have Large Scenes to save anymore. I've been using XREF for more than 10 years, never spend more than 5 seconds saving. 

Anonymous
Not applicable

@Anonymous what you're suggesting doesn't really make any sense, although I understand your sentiment. The point of an xref for managing large scenes is that, yes, you can quickly save the small "slave" scene which has hardly anything in it, if you're just working on the lighting of the scene, or cameras, for example, and that is indeed how we, and everyone else, works. But of course when it comes time to work on the main master scene, then what? I somehow don't believe the scenes you've been working on over the last 10 years are particularly heavy, if this has never been an issue for you. We're a relatively small studio, but I dread to think the number of hours lost by our artists every week while files save and max is locked. Let's say 1 min per save, per artist, and 10 saves per day (conservative estimate!) = 10 mins per artist per day with max locked. x 4 artists = 40 mins per day or 3.33hrs per week spent waiting for max to save.

 

We are regularly working with very large and complex master files, which themselves are complex, but also xref in a large number of equally complex xref files. Each one of those can take significant time to write. If all of that can be done in the background that translates to huge time savings and that saves us money.

attilaszabo
Alumni

Hi Alex,

 

We'd like to better understand what type of scenes take a long time to save?

Could you at least describe one of your representative scenes in terms of:

- number of objects?

- type of objects (geometry, lights etc)?

- modifiers?

- IK etc rigs?

- Character systems?

- Number of layers?

 

Thanks for any information you may have.

 

Attila Szabo

Agile Product Owner 

3ds Max, Autodesk

 

Anonymous
Not applicable

@attilaszabo

 

Hi there Attila,

 

Thanks for reaching out!

 

In general our scenes that take the longest to save, either as manual Save or as autosave, are ones with considerably dense meshes and potentially lots of them, such as scenes with lots of high-poly trees (which may or may not be animated/GrowFX etc.), so typically these max scenes can be around 1.5GB or even over 2GB (after optimisation). It can also be dense Revit meshes etc.

 

I don't think it's an issue around number of objects, lights or anything like that, and we're not using any IK/characters. I don't think no. layers has a huge effect either. It's really about super dense meshes, and lots of them.

 

We have compress-on-save enabled as well, which I believe does slow things down a lot, but even with this disabled it can still take some minutes to save (and load) complex scenes like these.

 

If you'd like any more information from me or the team here do let me know and we'll provide you with anything you need.

 

Kind regards,

 

attilaszabo
Alumni

This is very valuable info Alex. We'll investigate. Thanks very much.

 

Kelly_Michels
Autodesk
Status changed to: Future Consideration
 
michael_spaw
Autodesk

+1

 

Thanks

 

-Michael

danny.austin
Advocate

This is consistent with what we have experienced. I initially thought it was a network bottleneck but when I inspected the network log I could see a tiny stream of information when I initiated the save.. Then after a few minutes a massive spike right up to 100mbps. I wonder if the packaging process that 3ds max does is taking the time. 

Our files are roughly 80-300Mb and 1-15million polygons.  

Kelly_Michels
Autodesk
Status changed to: Future Consideration
 
electrotoast_old
Community Manager
Status changed to: Under Review
 
shinodem
Enthusiast

yes would be great like photoshop saving working now, without affecting workflow

whitesidevfx
Contributor

I'm currently using Max 2017. Autosave just kicks in regardless of what I'm doing in max. 
Most of the time it'll happen when I'm trying to enter fiddly numeric values.

Can there please be a system that is a little more aware of what the user is doing, and delay the autosave until it detects idle keyboard or mouse.


sam_large
Advocate

Further to this, max seems to "feel the need" to do an autosave seconds after idle time.

E.g. I leave max open whilst I go to lunch, I grab an object to move it or something and max immediately tries to autosave, despite almost nothing having changed.

 

I believe someone also suggested to change the way that Max saves to make it more similar to Photoshop i.e. you can keep working on the file and once save file is almost ready, final updates applied in the last few seconds (or minutes depending on your file) are added in.

SuperDrifter
Enthusiast

In the meantime, I've practiced incremental saves when completing something I don't want to loose.

 

Ramdisk is sweet for big projects.

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