Datasmith import causes 60% Windows Explorer CPU usage

Our initial import of quite a large track and field stadium went ok, but we noticed that having 300x200m large objects which go around 360 degrees might not be optimal (very weird distance field results), so we divided them up into smaller pie pieces.

We didn’t think this was a huge deal, but now when Unreal detects the changed .udatasmith file, the import takes hours and consumes 100% of CPU, where 60% of that is from Windows Explorer.

During all of this, Unreal Editor is completely unresponsive and just displays this in the corner:

20181129_091057.jpg

Also, we changed a texture for a material, and these new textures for the same Vray material name, did not get imported into Unreal (we still see the old textures, but the new UV mapping).

The stadium consists of 1500+ objects and is located on our company network storage.

Ok, we just killed Unreal, went into Windows Explorer and deleted all the previously imported stadium files, and then launched Unreal again. Just the mere act of selecting 1500+ object in the world and deleting them took several minutes for Unreal to process.

And then we did a similar thing for another much smaller set of geometry that we re-arranged the structure of in 3D Studio Max, and not only did that also lock up Unreal for a minute or so, we got a lot of “failed to reimport object X” and none of the geometry structure re-arranged itself properly in Unreal (and I’m talking abour grouping and hierarchy here).

Very disappointed with Datasmith right now.

Just curious about your RAM size of your system (CPU, not GPU). Does your UE4 project sit on the network or local? Which version of UE4/Datasmith are you using? Where is the data coming from? Revit?

I have 32gb of ram. Project is local right now (SSD), I’m using 4.21 Unreal, and Datasmith just says “beta version 1.0” in the plugins menu.

The data is originally coming from Solidworks, but we import it into 3D Studio Max first, and it has some Vray materials applied to it.

32Gb is probably borderline for complex scenes or operations. We recommend 64Gb for big scenes. Have you had any success?