I have 2 questions regarding the Rhino 8 material dialogue.
Problem: everytime I bring up this list from layer panel, I need to wait 5 seconds for the thumbnail to come up and refresh. This “delay” effects the productivity quite negatively.
Is there a way in the advanced settings that I could stop the thumbnail list refreshing every single time I click on the Material column in layer list? If not, could I make the preview render as small as possible to speed up the refresh?
How could I make the material preview thumbnails smaller? I have 30 materials and the list it always going outside of my screen.
>>It is possible to turn off the rendered preview in Rhino Options → Advanced. Set the EnablePreview to false. Does this speed up things?
I turned off EnablePreview as suggested. No, it does not do anything and does not speed things up. I am hoping the image should be cached somewhere and not re-calculating everytime I click on the list.
>>About the list going off screen? Can you take a bigger screenshot of the list? Is it possible to scroll and reach the end of the list?
You can see how the list get chopped off from the screen with the big and slow material preview. If there is a way to make the preview really small or just show as list - that would help a lot.
Windows 10 (10.0.19045 SR0.0) or greater (Physical RAM: 64GB)
.NET Framework 4.8.9282.0
Computer platform: LAPTOP - Plugged in [100% battery remaining]
Hybrid graphics configuration.
Primary display: Intel(R) Iris(R) Xe Graphics (Intel) Memory: 128MB, Driver date: 1-18-2024 (M-D-Y).
> Integrated graphics device with 4 adapter port(s)
- Secondary monitor is laptop’s integrated screen or built-in port
- Windows Main Display attached to adapter port #1
Primary OpenGL: NVIDIA RTX A1000 Laptop GPU (NVidia) Memory: 4GB, Driver date: 10-8-2024 (M-D-Y). OpenGL Ver: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 553.24
> Integrated accelerated graphics device (shares primary device ports)
- Video pass-through to primary display device
OpenGL Settings
Safe mode: Off
Use accelerated hardware modes: On
GPU Tessellation is: On
Redraw scene when viewports are exposed: On
Graphics level being used: OpenGL 4.6 (primary GPU’s maximum)
Anti-alias mode: 4x
Mip Map Filtering: Linear
Anisotropic Filtering Mode: High
Vendor Name: NVIDIA Corporation
Render version: 4.6
Shading Language: 4.60 NVIDIA
Driver Date: 10-8-2024
Driver Version: 31.0.15.5324
Maximum Texture size: 32768 x 32768
Z-Buffer depth: 24 bits
Maximum Viewport size: 32768 x 32768
Total Video Memory: 4 GB
Rhino plugins that do not ship with Rhino
C:\Program Files\Enscape\Enscape.Rhino.Plugin-net48\Enscape.Rhino8.Plugin.dll “Enscape.Rhino8.Plugin” 4.2.0.1589
I was wondering why I didn’t have to make this kind of complain over the last 5 years of using Rhino, and never need to fiddle with Advanced Settings in Rhino.
Okay here is a GIF showing how snappy R7 is, doing the same action with the same file saved down.
You can see the thumb is not regenerating every time. Also, you can see how the list has smaller thumbnail compared to R8, and the list UX doesn’t get “cut off” when it gets long.
And now I can also see a lag when opening the dropdown. When the Cache is set to false, then we do not cache the previews and they get always regenerated.
Can you make one more test for me. How does the dropdown work when both of these are set to false and then restart Rhino?
With this combination and Rhino restarted, there is completely no lag with the dropdown at all.
The trade off is, there is no more previews for materials.
Was the EnablePreviewCache initially set to false? The dropdown should eventually get faster when it caches more and more previews and in the end they should all be cached, but that can take some time.
Are you using Rhino Render as the renderer? There is a setting that can make the rendered previews to render faster and then the cache will fill up faster.
So one can adjust the number of preview samples for the preview. The default value is 150, but one can drop it to 10 and see how that affects the previews. The downside is that the rendered previews sharpness is not as good as with 150 samples.
Initially…not sure. I have never had a need to dial into advanced settings before this…It is the slowness of the dropdown that prompted me to poke around there.
Render engine I only have Rhino Render.
I leave PreviewSamples at 10 now. Really good enough…
Thank you. Hope this helps other users with default settings so no one needs to modify any of these values for fast dropdown.
my material tab slowness persists with all the suggestions above.
Didn’t have this issue for Rhino 7. It’s new after upgrading to 8 and have been bugged by it since SR1… any other settings you can suggest?
In over 12 years of using Rhino and with my latest PCs being ca 15 times as fast as 10 years ago 2 things have never been as slow as they are now (Running Rhino 8 on both a Laptop and a Tower with the same issues and it’s not about performance):
Layer Panel has gotten slow and is lagging now in Rhino 8
Material Panel / Selecting a Material from the Layer Panel is excruciatingly slow
Very clearly it has to do with the material previews.
I rather give up ALL previews than waiting for literally a minute for the textures to load, when I want to assign a texture or having a 10 sec delay on my layer panel and when I am creating new layers. It’s not practical this way. Please get rid of this and bring it back when it works.
Adding on: The function where I create a new material through the layer panel, by clicking on the material icon and then go to the plus and create a material, which used to be so easy and handy, does not work with enscape anymore in rhino 8. I have to go to the materials tab, create a new material, back to the layer panel and assign from the drop down, with all the lag, by now it’s ca 5 mins later…
All of the above make Rhino very unhandy to use for Rendering atm. It literally impacts my workflow and render production time. I would try to fix this soon.
(Working with a medium heavy model and tons of layers and materials. The computer can handle everything very smoothly and well, rendering is quick and real time super fast. It’s just the material thing that’s broken in the software. Worked with similar models in Rhino 4-7 on way slower PCs and was not an issue ever)
I had a similar suspicion that the culprit to the slowness/UI lag is due to material preview rendering. I brought it up in another thread but received a denial from @dale
At this stage McNeel is not clear about acknowlegement of this issue, and we are not very sure whether a fix or improvement is underway.
I think there are several factors involved that cause the slowness. I am myself trying to solve these issues for the material panel (not looking at layers panel as others have better knowledge about it) and try to find fixes if possible.
As there are probably several factors causing these issues that means it is harder to figure out fixes. I hope to find them one by one and fix them.
I have had a meeting with @Iyang_Huang and with @Elias_Brulin and both have problems with slow material editor. The cause seems to be different. In Elias case rendering and raytraced work ok, but he does not get rendered thumbnails. And because the thumbnails are not rendered, then they are not cached. Next step is to figure out why the previews are not rendering for Elias.
There is a simple test one can do to check if a thumbnail preview gets rendered or not.
Step1: Open a new empty model.
Step2: Open material editor.
Step3: Create a material of type gem.
Step4: Right click and hold button down and drag mouse to rotate preview.
As one rotates the preview Rhino creates quick previews that has this transparent skin. When one stops the rotation, then the rendered preview is created. This preview is more shiny. If you do not get the more shiny preview, then the rendered previews do not work.
It is also possible to turn off previews by setting these advanced settings to false.
Wanted to mention Ians problem. Maybe others can confirm this behaviour as I am unable to reproduce the problem. So it seems to be related to textures on a shared server. So he told me that everything is ok if the textures are locally on the machine, but if he adds even one texture that is in the server, then the material editor performance drops a lot. Rhino 7 works well but not Rhino 8.
