Anyone got a trick for avoiding slowdowns with MASH in the viewport?

[ryan harrington]

My scenes become horribly, horribly slow when stepping frames with MASH instancers are visible in any way.
I can animate, or I can look at Mash, but if I try to look at Mash and animate at the same time....I feel weltschmerz. 

World pain.

The camera will move freely, but stepping frames is super slow.
I've hopped around trying to set all the dirty bits to clean....all sorts...

I've got two ideas left, one of them is "burn the computer and walk the earth".

Would love to have more ideas, no ideas are too stupid.

[desig...@gmail.com]

I think you can cache mash, or make an alembic and turn the mash off while animating. Turning down the instance numbers, or substituting cubes does the trick for me usually.

Good luck,

Ryan

 

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[Ian Waters]

One of the very last things I did on Maya was add Draw Percentage (I think that’s what it was called) to the Instancer, so if the draw is the slow bit you can cut down the number of instances drawn (though they will all still render of course).

[ryan harrington]

I should have specified, my instances are all static...so it's  Mash is populating a static surface with static instances....which had me assuming that it wouldn't need to cache.  
It is 100% behaving like it's evaluating something that's animating. So I'll have a go at this. 
I might also see if I can cook the instancer to an RS proxy

Thanks!
R

[ryan harrington]

That's one of the odd things...I can set my instancer to display 0.01, (that's one solar panel in this case), or even 0.01 Bounding boxes, and it still crawls in the timeline. 
Is there any utility in doing a Mash cache if it's a static mesh instanced to a static mesh?

I would quite appreciate it if you would become one of those weirdos who just keeps turning up at their old job, long after anyone has forgotten that their contract is up.

Thanks,
 R

[Ian Waters]

Haha! If only I didn’t have a mortgage to pay.

Okay so another possibility is that one (or more) of the MASH nodes has a connection to the Time node, and each time the frame changes this is triggering a recalculation. You obviously don’t need that so you could also try sniffing around for Time connections in the node editor and disconnect them.

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[joiec...@gmail.com]

I don't want to troll this topic, but u left Autodesk because their intention is to kind of replace MASH with Bifrost graphs and thus remove MASH from MAYA?

[desig...@gmail.com]

Well if that's true, they have a LONG way to go. I think for most people, bifrost graph is impenetrable. I can get a few things to happen, but it's pretty much like a completely new procedural software package living inside an ancient DCC, and they don't speak much to each other.  

Autodesk has a string of bad habits along this line; introducing new aquisitions into old software, where they don't speak the same language. rigid bodies, vs. bullet physics,  maya particles vs nParticles, maya fluids vs. bifrost, maya hair vs Xgen. There's probably more. Frankenstein. 

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[ryan harrington]

Hey Ian, sorry I didn't reply to this at the time it was all getting into a little bit of a crunch, so I had to move on without resolving the issue. 
I didn't find anything obvious with breaking time connections.

One issue I never chased down was that some of the build scenes (with MASH) getting referenced were running at a different frame rate to the master scene.  Those scenes weren't animating, so it wasn't really a shark close to the boat...but I still wonder if the offset frame stepping might be an evaluation issue. 

That job's probably coming back, so I'll probably get around to synching it all up. If I solve it, I'll update.

Thanks for chipping in anyway. 
R