[Michael Betke]

Exporting large scenes from 3dsmax to maxwell is taking very long. Processing data too. In my current project an aerial with lots of proxy vegetation its takes around 15 minutes before the scene starts to render.

I noticed that during the whole process only one core is working making my 12 threaded CPU (X980) loaded only at 13% at all. I think there is no bottleneck because my working partition with OS and project data is a Crucial SSD C300 which is really fast. My 24GB Ram can't be a bottleneck either.

Any comments on this?

[zdeno]

I have old P4 without HT , we can switch our cores , and all problems would disappear

[Michael Betke]

Hehe I don't want to complain on a high level here but I'm curious why Maxwell scales so well while rendering with all cores but doesn't use the full available power while setting up the scene.

[zdeno]

if You use plugin maybe it is 3dmax fault? try to ask is 3dmax thread , boghdan will tell

[dmeyer]

We've gotten around this for animation by running the exporter for MXS creation (from maya) on our render farm.

Not sure how it is on Max, but with Maya you can run multiple instances of the exporter at once if you do it via command line.

[Mihnea Balta]

Maya and Max are not designed to allow concurrent access to the scene data. We can try to export from multiple threads, but there's no guarantee that it will work. It may work in most cases, but crash or produce weird things in some corner cases, so it's not really a viable solution. The Maxwell SDK may also have issues with writing geometry from several threads at the same time (I haven't checked, but usually if something is not designed with concurrency in mind, it doesn't work concurrently).

We'll look into this, but it depends on many factors, most of which are outside of our control.

[Michael Betke]

I prefer to wait longer for export but have rock solid and error free work then.

[Jozvex]

I'm pretty sure it's the same with the built in mental ray too!