terrific slowdown on loading scene

[Maximus]

Hi guys..

so today i decided to try to download and spend some time on the Ronen Bekerman archviz challenge, so i went to his website and downloaded the .fbx file which you can find here:

http://www.ronenbekerman.com/mies-van-d ... -3d-model/

the file i downloaded is the last one: rb_neue_nationalgalerie_v01_02_FBX.zip (the file is 149mb).

Now i imported this file into Softimage, it took like 4 minutes to open...
Then i tried to navigate the viewport and it was at 4fps. in shaded mode.
Then i was curious and checked the spec of the file and here they are:

Objects Total 10000
Triangles total 600000

Numbers are aprox cause softimage crashed and i didnt even bother to reload the scene.
Now how it crashed you might ask, cool i'll tell you. Once it imported the geometry i wanted to wipe out the shaders and just give a single shader to all the scene to setup a lighting.
Ctrl+7 opened the material manager (slow like hell to open), i selected all the shaders except the scene material which is just one, and hit Delete.

Softimage hangs for like 2 minutes then crashed.

Now beside the last part regarding materials (which i am disappointed nonetheless), was completely impossible to work and navigate into a scene which didnt have even 1 milion polygons.
Another crazy thing is softimage hangs for 1 minute when i ctrl+a select all geometry in scene, or rectangle select everything.
The geometry itself is really simple, not even subdivided. I'm actually shocked on how bad Softimage is performing.
Gigapoly core what? I am running on a 24gb Ram PC, Intel i7990Xtreme overclocked, Geforce 570HD and a SSD OCZ hard disk.
I sure dont have a 10k machine but its not even a cheap one.

Now this is disappointing and frustrating. Is this scene so heavy? I really dont think so. I wonder what happens with softimage performance. Or am i doing someting wrong?
Curios about the scene i opened 3ds max.
It imported the fbx in less than 40 seconds. I could select everything ctrl+a or rectangle select everything instantly. It lags a bit when everything is centered in the viewport and you try to pan, but as soon as you select one element and center zoom on it and rotate, it is fluid.

Maya took 30 seconds to import it, the wireframe mode in viewport was at insane performance almost no drop in fps (while in softimage you couldnt almost move the viewport).
MAya in shaded mode lags a bit but i can assure you can just work fine.

Now what i did was, ok maybe Softimage doesnt like fbx. Lets try to convert it into an obj.
I converted the file into ano obj from max, result was 66mb file. I've imported it into softimage, it imported it quite fast, but performance wise was the exact same thing.
Slow fps, select all geometry at once to rescale or move the whole model made it crashes 5 times on 5.

I'm honestly..speechless how bad are the performance with Softimage atm. I could think its my hardware, but maya and max just do the job fine.
This isnt a 90 milion polygons file.. its barely 1 mil polygon. So anyone have any idea why? is this supposed to behave this horrific way? Because i honestly didnt expect.
Always heard people glorify the gigpoly core and the softimage viewport performance, i'm like huh?

You can try yourself, i've posted the link to download the file there.
It might just be me, but ...hopefully someone else try this and compare if i'm the only one with this terrible performance.

Max

[Rork]

First thing that comes to mind would be the amount of objects.
Softimage isn't pretty good with that, looking at all the stuff every object is containing.

Also, have a look at an object, and strip out all stuff not needed. There's always lots of properties after conversion that don't make sense in Softimage.

Last, 3rd party 3d format import is a joke in Softimage. A lot of people I know go the Max/Maya > Softimage route, or bought Polytrans for their conversion needs.

rob

p.s. had a DL and quick look at the file. If you don't have it yet, install the FBX viewer/converter from Autodesk. Then convert the fbx into a new 2011/2012 FBX. The size will drop to about 27Mb! Also, uncheck everything you don't need/want for import, e.g. animation etc.

[Rork]

Hi Max,

Had a quick go with it. Converted the FBX from within the FBX viewer. This always cleans up fluff from other 3D apps. Like I said it brought back the filesize to 27Mb from 147Mb.
Importing the FBX happened straight away, I turned off most options as it is a static model. Import still took about 2 minutes.

Wireframe mode runs pretty smooth, hidden line and shaded lag a bit but nothing major. Selected I'm running at about 4500 objects here, the rest is probably nulls and such.
As a 'normal' archviz model, there's some heavy merging/cleanup to be done I guess. Nothing more out of the box when converting Sketchup stuff into SI.

I scaled the model back to proper dimensions after import, did some rotating etc. but have no crashes. If you cannot get it to work, I can get you my testscene to see what happens.

cheers,

rob

[SamHowell]

The amount of objects in the scene rather than actual polygon count is always the killer in my experience. Lot's clusters and materials not doing anything aren't good either.

[Rork]

Yup, there's a ton of clusters. Materials not so much.

Also, it's layers and layers of objects unders nulls, under nulls.......
And, as a nice archviz scene is normally built, everything is a separate object.

[ace63]

I suggest posting this as an improvement wish to the SiC, I did so aswell.

[fabilabo]

Hi,

SI always have problem (in my experience) with a lot of objects, because objects have properties.
When you import FBX, each objects have a null parented wich have (useless) properties too.
And actually this object is totally splited into a lot of pieces.
Best you can do is to select by materials, merge /delete sources for having only a few objects.