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Author Topic: Suggestion: Disk Caching to improve load/render times.  (Read 1006 times)

Lehm_2001

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Suggestion: Disk Caching to improve load/render times.
« on: February 17, 2019, 05:55:27 AM »
I've been using RC for a few years now, but primarily used it for smaller things like curbs, railings that kind of thing.  On a couple of recent projects I decided to try to build the majority of the structures with RC to see how it faired.  For the most part I really liked the flexibility that defining the facade of a building parametrically allowed.  However one thing I did not like was the extreme slow down in loading and rendering.  One scene now takes 10 minutes to load as it rebuilds the all the RC objects, most of which have not changed since the last time the files were opened.

Would it be possible to add an option to cache the built RC objects to disk so that the next time it opens the max file and the RC object has not changed it can simply load the disk version and not waste time rebuilding it?

iToo

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Re: Suggestion: Disk Caching to improve load/render times.
« Reply #1 on: February 18, 2019, 09:31:58 AM »
Hi, although it could be done, to prepare all RC data for a file format would be a complex process.

Actually you can convert the RC objects to stand-alone instances, using RailClone Tools.
The process is not destructive, because at any time you can delete the instances from RC Tools, and enable the RC object again.

As drawback, not all features are supported in stand-alone objects (Material change, UVW XForm, etc.), and Max doesn't perform well with tons of objects in the scene.
But it may be useful for many situations.

In any case, if you can send us a scene with your RC objects, we may check it. I would like to identify what is causing the slowdown, and how to improve it.

Thanks,

Carlos Quintero
iToo Software

Lehm_2001

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Re: Suggestion: Disk Caching to improve load/render times.
« Reply #2 on: February 20, 2019, 01:22:23 PM »
I wasn't aware of Railclone Tools, but I have started to convert some objects to VrayProxies, which is pretty much the same idea.  Unfortunately when you convert it from a rc object you lose the ability to use the RC color map, which many of my objects use.  (It'd be nice if that map supported regular polygon elements as well as rc elements).

Okay so if caching the meshes is out... what about asynchronously building the meshes?  So you can open a scene (or alter a mesh in an already open scene ) and start to work in the file and the rc meshes will pop into existence as they finish being constructed.  But that would require making it a separate thread and I have a feeling you already would have done that if that was simple.

So I guess I'll learn how to deal with the current performance limitations with Proxies/Instances where possible.  But caching and threading would go along way toward making RC easier to work with.  But if they're not possible, no worries, I think your product is great already.