I completely agree with this. However I would like to add that any lack of performance regarding high object count is probably less an issue with the 3D app than an inherent processing limitation within most high end graphics systems.
We see this same behavior in other applications including very expensive high end simulation software. At a basic level what most apps appear to be doing at each iteration, frame change, camera viewport change, other update, etc is cycling through each root level object and checking for updates or mods that need to be applied per the methodology within that application. One way you could think about this is that it starts at the top of the explorer(outliner in maya) and repetitively cycles through the explorer list over and over and over applying updates as it goes and as needed. We have scenes, simulations, and scenarios where we have processed hundreds of thousands of aircraft for example and these kinds of simulations can bring the most powerful computers to their knees even though each individual object is as simple as possible. It's been my personal opinion that the operating system and how it breaks things down for processing between core and interface may also be part of the issue. I've often wondered if it was an integer vs floating point issue. Even more shocking was that we often saw the same results on SGI and Windows simultaneously back when we were still using those beasts. One of our simulation software for example had a special flag that turned off the interface refresh and we would get all the performance back. They also provided us a special object container that acted like a mini scenario holding hundreds of thousands of objects within a root level multi-object. When using this special multi-object performance never skipped a beat but getting access to or from the objects within the root object was no longer as direct. The point being that if you have unreasonably high object counts, you might be able to break your scene down into a handful of Models with the objects distributed under the Models. I've never tried this with Soft and don't know if this would significantly affect Soft's performance, but it might be worth a shot. -- Joey Ponthieux LaRC Information Technology Enhanced Services (LITES) Mymic Technical Services NASA Langley Research Center __________________________________________________ Opinions stated here-in are strictly those of the author and do not represent the opinions of NASA or any other party. From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Alan Fregtman Sent: Friday, November 01, 2013 11:09 AM To: XSI Mailing List Subject: Re: Extracted meshes and performance Historically Soft has dealt quite well with few objects with intense topology much better than thousands of low-res objects. --
