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I am having problems with a scene that has 500k triangles and when I try to navigate the camera in the viewport in Studio, response is extremely slow. I get a beach ball for a few seconds and then after 10-15 seconds, the camera will jump to some arbitrary point of view. IE Over zoomed or over rotated. On other scenes, the problem is not so bad, but still, not smooth and good for working. I have the same problem in wireframe mode, so I think it is some other problem than the viewport mode. I am on a macpro 2,1 with an ATI HD5770. I also tried playing with various settings in preferences, none of which fixed the problem. texture res was even set to 32x32.

Which shading mode, and does the scene contain many separate objects?

Have you tried with another heavy geo scene, but lets say only 1,2 objects in the scene? 500K triangles doesn't sound like very much so the first thing to do is to see if this is something particular to that scene or not.

I have 16000 Objects and shading mode does not seem to matter. Even at wireframe , it is so slow, that I have no control over camera. Initiating a move of the camera will result in a massive overshoot of the position or rotation. MXS is 25mb. Studio is using only 1.2 GB of ram when scene is loaded.

If 16000 objects is too much, how can I manage the material assignment if I were to Merge all objects / groups into a single Object? Is there a way to manage this from the ArchiCAD plug in? I think not.

Right now, I am trying to test the result after I merge the all objects. Right off the bat, Merge does not appear to be multi-threaded process. It has taken 30 minutes to get to the prompt to name the resulting Merged mesh and it has been about 45 minutes now to perform the merge and it's still working on the merge with one processor. I can already tell that this is not an acceptable workflow. I can't wait that long to do this process every time I open a model. I might have to save out a new model from ArchICAD in an hour and would have to do this process all over again.

Any suggestions?

Thank you very much!

2 hours now on this merge to single object and memory is now at 2.33 GB, up from 1.2GB. Still not done. I am afraid I will need to quit here in a minute to get on to some productive work. I still hope to work out the problem.

Here is a link to the 28MB file.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7032388/Knourek.mxs

Just to mention that in many cases wireframe mode can be much slower than shaded, because shaded has some hardware acceleration on the graphics card. So usually, shaded mode is the fastest, not wireframe. It sounds to me that the problem here is the nr of objects and non pro cards usually have a problem with this, as far as I know.

You don't need to merge everything in a single object. Usually the workflow is to merge based on material assignment. Having 100 vs 16 000 objects in the scene can make a huge difference in your case. I'm not sure if this merging based on material can be done automatically when you export the scene from Archicad, please ask in the AC forum.

EDIT: Checking your scene, it's pretty obvious what the problem is. Each tile of your roof is a separate object! Merging all of those in Studio will take a long time yes, and RAM will increase since it will also then hold the undo into memory. So if you can't somehow merge each of those tiles into one object in AC, merge using Studio just the tiles and once its done, save the scene, quit Studio, then restart and reopen the scene.

Btw, even without the tiles merged, on my Win PC the scene navigates well, and I have a pretty crappy GFX card (GTX 460).

ALTERNATIVELY:
1. Select the material applied to the roof tiles, right click > Select assigned objects
2. Now in the object list, right click on the object selection (all 13500 of them....) right-click > Group.
3. Now that these objects are grouped, hide the group.

Check now if viewport navigation is faster (remember first to deselect the group before navigating).
When it's time to render, unhide the group and render.