Export from max takes awhile

#1 I have heard this before many times and I have no idea why it takes this long for some people.

The longest export times I get are about 45 seconds.

Very long morph animations can cause long export times. If you are using any sort of mesh animation that also has multiple detail levels, it can take forever.

The file size for such an export would also end up being very large.

If you describe what you are doing, perhaps I can try to identify any issues that might be causing the slow export.

If nothing is out of the ordinary with the shape, I have a suspicion that it might be the build of the exporter you are using.

If you want, send me an email and either send me the shape and I can see if it exports faster on my machine,

or I can send you my copy of the exporter plugin and see if it makes a difference.

Joe

#2 The shape is the race car shape in the new examples, but with a modified body. I am now at around 1k faces and it takes about 10 minutes to export.

-FD

#3 The buggy vehicle? Hmm, this shape takes me about 8 seconds when I export it.

Check you dump file. Look for the 'Optimizing Meshes' part of the file.

Does it have the line, "Using quick and dirty stripping method." in the section where it is optimizing the meshes?

Joe

#4 Yes it does.
-FD

#5 Actually Joe I encountered this last night too with one of my character models that I was re-exporting.

The only differences between this export (which was slow) and other exports (which were fairly quick) were, a) I used the 2mb DLE file from DTS Exporter Doc zips as opposed to a 600kb DLE that a friend recompiled for me from the R3 source, and b) I used the standard CFG from the download pack.

I get home tonight I am going to replace the DLE with my old one and give it another whirl. I will post my results here.

Logan

#6 I think the problem is the build of the exporter. If anyone who is having this problem wants to test it, drop me an email and I will send it out. I may post more info on this issue later today.

#7 At first I though it might have been the triangle stripping, but as the shape is small so it is probably not the issue

Had a little email chat with Clark and he seems to remember seeing this problem before and it was related to builds of the exporter that were done with the wrong compiler flags set.

Check the dump file to see if there is anyhting that looks out of the ordinary. Also, try unchecking all the checkboxes in the dump file control just in case the problem lies in the logging itself (if some feature is writing insane amount of info to the dump file.

I am almost positive that it is the build of the exporter you are using. It appears (based on Logan's comments) that the version that comes with the docs is one of the bad ones (yikes). If it is the 2mb version it is probably the bad one. Logan has already sent me an email and I have sent the version I am using to him to test this out.

Hopefully he will post the results of his test here.

#8 Here are the results of some simple tests that I did today at lunch with a few player models that I had with me here at work. As you are about to see there is a very signifigant difference between the public R4 exporter DLEs (as found in the DTS Exporter Docs) and the one that Joe (and a few others) are running with.

Quote:
Exporting a simple character of 1500 polys with a biped skeleton and Multires
Joe's file... 15 seconds
DTS doc file... 3 minutes 10 seconds

Exporting a simple character of 1200 polys with a custom bones skeleton and Multires
Joe's file... 7 seconds
DTS doc file... 2 minutes

Exporting a sphere of 960 faces as a static object
Joe's file... 2 seconds
DTS doc file... 19 seconds

When I get home tonight I am going to update this post with my results from exporting a copy of the RW Orc and Steam Knight, but I suspect that I will get a similar result.

In my honest opinion though I definately think that there is something wrong with the public R4 exporter (the 2mb file size is probably should have been the first clue, especially when put in comparison with the R3 exporter). If someone with some programming knowledge and access to the Max R4 SDK can look at the source for the exporter (I believe it is in CVS) and correct this issue, we could get this issue resolved.

Logan

#9 Just out of curiosity, if anyone is actually looking into solving this problem (from the programming side of things) could you please post an acknowledgement here? Thanks.

Logan

#10 We are working on it. Hopefully this will be cleared up in a day or so.

#11 Has there been any progress on this? Inquiring minds (and projects with frustrated modellers) want to know...

Thanks!

-David

#12 The fixes have been identified and the information sent to Rick. I will follow up on it sometime today or tomorrow and see what the situation is.