force interrupt "viewport 2.0 calculating..."

[dkrelina]

I'm finding the viewport takes a long time to calculate when turning on shaded mode (pressing '6') or using render layers and going back and forth between them. The viewport momentarily becomes unresponsive and in the Help Line it shows, "viewport 2.0 calculating...". It might stay like this for up to a minute.

Is there a way to force interrupt the viewport once it starts calculating? Pressing esc doesn't seem to help. In general, the scene responds much faster when I disable the viewport completely using the following command: refresh -su true; 

Is there any way to force interrupt the viewport calculation? I'm using Viewport 2.0 in Maya 2015.

[sean.heasley]

Hi @dkrelina

This is definitely an odd issue. Would you mind posting your hardware specs so I can make sure everything can handle Maya adequately?

Also, out of curiosity, if you change the renderer to 'Legacy Default' or 'Legacy HIgh Quality' and then switch to shaded mode do you see a performance drop?

Let me know if anything changes!

If one or more of these posts helped answer your question, please click Accept as Solution on the posts that helped you so others in the community can find them easily.

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[dkrelina]

Hey Sean! Thanks so much for your response.

Here are my computer specs...

HP Z820
Intel Xeon CPU E5-2650 v2 @ 2.60GHz
32 GB RAM
Windows 7 Professional SP 1

I've tried switching to Legacy Default and Legacy High Quality. Both of them actually respond slower than Viewport 2.0 while in Shaded Mode. While in Unshaded Mode, the performance is similar across the board.

Inside the scene I have about 30 file nodes connected to a number of lamberts. Each of these has a texture resolution ranging from 1K - 6K. I'm working on a "Matte Painting" style of scene with low poly count, but high texture quality.

Turning on and off shaded mode (going from '5' to '6' on the keypad) or going from one render layer to another (with material overrides on the layers) is laggy.

In the Viewport 2.0 settings I have tried clamping the texture resolution to a low value. It's sped things up a bit, but it still quite slow to switch between render layers even when set to low values (Max Texture Resolution: 128).

I should edit what I said earlier... in the Help Line it says "Viewport 2.0 Processing..."

Once the Viewport starts "Processing" I would like to find a way to force it to stop, and then turn off the textures so that it doesn't interrupt my workflow for a good minute or so.

Would it be OK to PM you the scene files to check on your end?

[mspeer]

Hi!

Graphic Card, VRAM?

Maybe your graphic card can't handle this amount of data, this would result in constant loading/unloading.

[dkrelina]

GeForce GTX Titan X (12,288 MB GDDR5)

GeForce GTX 750 Ti (2048 MB GDDR5)

[mspeer]

Hi!

Could you remove the objects one by one to see if it get's linearly faster or if there is one particular object/texture or overall texture amount that causes the problem.

What are the file sizes for the textures?

With multiple layers you can have easily more than 1 GB per file and then all components of a computer become relevant, even hard disk speed.(Example: Loading 6 GB (30 files * 200 MB per file) with 100MB/s takes 60 seconds) .

[dkrelina]

Hey thanks for your thoughts.

The texture sizes range from 1-16 MB, totaling 60MB. They're TIF images.

In terms of texture optimization, what is the recommended file type for textures? Is speed only decided by the file size? Or does file type make a difference? To speed things up, do people ever work with proxy source images at a lower resolution? Is there a workflow to allow for this within Maya?

I just did a test with the same scene on another system. The times are slightly faster and I wonder if it's because I'm using faster hard drives on the new setup.

I'm still wondering whether it's possible to interrupt the "Viewport 2.0 Processing..." once it's already started doing its thing. If it takes a long time to load all the images, is there any way to stop the calculation midway through?

For example, say I'm working on the scene in unshaded mode and I reach for the 'T' key but I accidentally press the '6' key, I'll have to wait a long time before the scene becomes responsive again. Is there any way to force the calculation to stop?

[mspeer · Accepted solution]

Hi!

Since Maya 2016 there is a new Texture Loading Mode ("Parallel") which does not block UI.

http://help.autodesk.com/view/MAYAUL/2017/ENU/?guid=GUID-BF017019-B89A-47F0-8AB5-106C058AB854

I switched to old mode "Immediate" (Maya 2015 and older) and with some 8K textures i could replicate the problem.

I dare you can interrupt this and so i recommend to use a newer Version of Maya, cause the "Parallel" Loading Mode is a big benefit.

On the other side, this loading should only happen once per scene, so it should not be a big problem to wait a minute.

(BTW, with Clamping it takes longer to load because the clamped textures have to be calculated first, but without, VRAM fills up very fast.)

Using Proxies is possible and could be a solution if you have to load the textures often

Example, current loading time about 1 minute:

- From 8K to 2K and removing clamping  => your scene loads in less than 4 seconds

- from 16k to 2K, or 8K to 1K and removing clamping => your scene loads in less than 1 second

[john.paul.giancarlo]

there are a few things you can do to optimise viewport 2.0 

1- I would recommend clamping your max texture resolution to something like 256 and reload all

2- make sure your textures are in your local hard drive and not over the network otherwise it might take a while to pull that information from the server !

3- turn off AO and antialiasing if not needed

hopes this works !

[dkrelina]

Thanks for the info guys. Very useful stuff!

The new texture loading mode sounds great. I should definitely check that out in 2016.

In the Viewport 2.0 settings, where does it save the clamped textures? Are these something that need to be calculated each time the scene is opened? Or are they saved to a specific path on the drive. In any case, I'd like to find a way to do this only once so that I don't have to regenerate the textures each time I open the scene.

For this specific scene, perhaps the proxy route is best. I have the feeling that for these "matte painting" CG scenes (where it's important to actually see the textures within the viewport) making the low-res proxies manually might give me more control, and possibly look better than the textures in clamped mode. Clamping makes them look super crunchy.

Does it matter what file type I use for the proxies? Does Maya work better with one over another? I'm using TIFs, but I could just as easily use PNG, TGA, EXR, etc. as long as they have alpha. Does it matter if I use compression? (LZW, ZIP, etc.) I'm not sure if compression would speed up or slow down loading times. Or maybe the difference in speed is irrelevant.

Once again, I'm looking for ways to optimize the scene and reduce load times 🙂

[mspeer]

Hi!

Some renderer do not support different compression algorithms for TIFF or some file formats, apart from that there should be no problem whatever file format you use.

I don't think the clamped textures are saved to disk, so they need to be calculated again every time you load the scene.

Proxies will give you the most speed improvement.