krakatoa viewport performance

[phizikl]

i was just wondering, max becomes really slow, when you have 400,000 particles in the viewport

funnily, the new max 2013 (and 2012) handle geometry really well, i can have 10million poly frost shape, and smoothly rotate around it!

400k particles however i cannot

anything we can do to speed up performance?

• also, maybe a thing for the wishlist, it would be great, if there was a magical button, that converts your 70million particle sim, into a 50K every nth particle proxy,
  ill gladly wait 5minutes and then automatically use proxy sequence to gain fast viweport performance

would be cool if this was an integrated and automated feature that can be done with a click of a button and seamlessly integrates into the prt loader

[Chad]

You don’t need to wait, the proxy generation can be done via Deadline.

Ideally it would be done in as few clicks as possible, yes. You’re talking about a 70Mp PRT set, right? For things like proxy generation, something like Partio might work. SR should also allow you to do proxy saving with python, too. Just thinking of ways of saving licenses.

[Bobo]

i was just wondering, max becomes really slow, when you have 400,000 particles in the viewport
funnily, the new max 2013 (and 2012) handle geometry really well, i can have 10million poly frost shape, and smoothly rotate around it!
400k particles however i cannot
anything we can do to speed up performance?

I tested with the same geospheres from my Mattes test - 800K faces, 400K vertices.
I switched them all to Box display and checked “Vertex Ticks” to draw as large dots.
I orbited around them and got between 25 and 30 fps.

I then saved these vertices as PRT and loaded in a PRT Loader. Orbiting the viewport gave me EXACTLY the same performance of around 25-30 fps.
So the way we draw point primitives and the way Max draws point primitives is the same.

Now if you want to drag the time slider, the majority of the time in the PRT Loader is spent unzipping data from the PRT files.
Your only solution is a very fast drive (e.g. FusionIO or at least a fast SSD), but it will still hit the CPU hard just to unzip.
The other solution is showing one partition out of many (if you saved as multiple partitions already).
Or if the data was stored randomly, loading first N will do, too. But mostly it does not work because the particles are sorted (e.g. from Naiad, PFlow+Fume etc.)

• also, maybe a thing for the wishlist, it would be great, if there was a magical button, that converts your 70million particle sim, into a 50K every nth particle proxy,
  ill gladly wait 5minutes and then automatically use proxy sequence to gain fast viweport performance
  would be cool if this was an integrated and automated feature that can be done with a click of a button and seamlessly integrates into the prt loader

The magical button IS already on the wishlist, and I even had a prototype in the works. I just have to find the time to sit down and finally implement this.
Thanks for the feedback!