When i do a model and add a meshsmooth modifier with more than an iteration of 1 i get a lot of lag in the viewport when rotating the view or whatever. I was wondering which of m hardware was causing this. I 'am using Gmax.
Here are my PC specs.
- 2 x 512Mb Pc 133 Ram + 128Mb (total of 1.12 Gb)[8D]
- 20 Gb Maxtor Hard Drive[:(]
- P4 1.5 Ghz[^]
- 16 Mb Nvidia Vanta[:(] (Please don't laugh i wil get a Radeon 9600 Pro soon)
just realise that meshsmooth is adding a _LOT_ of triangles to render, and thus the slowdown. (not certaing what algorithm you have running, but for example, at level 1, 1 triangle could be split to 4, at level 2, 1 triangle could be split to 16, level3, 1 goes to 64....
so at level3, your 1000 triangle model is changed to a 64000 triangle model, which might be a bit slower to render
David is right on the ball here - each iteration in subdivision is consecutively multiplying your geometry by the power of 4. That's a lot of overhead to translate and render all those polys (plus the extra layers of wireframes and vertices if you've got them showing too)
If it's an Nvidia Vanta then I wouldn't be expecting you to be running it in hardware acceleration since in the end the vertex transformations needed per frame would top out making software rendering more reliable and fast. So in the end I'd assume your CPU; with this said however, don't expect to preview and edit in real time in viewports with a meshsmooth on at all.
How do people get around this? Well first of all, the meshsmooth shouldn't even matter when you're making the mesh. The control mesh is the important thing, and should define -all- your volume and shape; you should never get the computer to do this for you. Example here is don't make a meshsmoothed sphere out of a box. It's just overkill and bad practice, taking out so much control to the artist. Keep your control mesh detailed, but still efficient - use your polys where they're needed to add detail. So, you've got this control mesh that looks like your near finished mesh - you only need 1 iteration of meshsmooth to make it lovely and smooth since the control meshes density allows this. So with this 1 iteration you can preview at an ok speed in the viewport, but you can also just set it to only meshsmooth at render time (dunno if this works with gmax... is there a render?). But anyways, that's how you usually handle it.
Here's a cheap easy way for me to explain visually - an old torso/head I did ages ago, wireframe is the control mesh without meshsmooth, rendered is with 1 iteration.
[img]http://www.garandnet.net/~malakai/content/highpoly/pictures/tastes_like…]
Don't worry. The worst thing about SubD (fake or real, although real is even worse) is the lag that is involved. I have a P4 2.53 and a gig of ram and in Maya a whole character will lag. When working I just have to drop the smooth to no iterations and make my modifications. It still does lag a bit, but that is the joy of SubD. I haven't used Max in a while, but from what JI has said, it sound like you can drop the levels quite easily. Just get used to doing that. If you can set up hotkeys to pop your iterations up and down, then that's even better.
I'd say it's your 3D card, I wouldn't use anything less than 32Mb, even then you can get painful amounts of lag.