M1 Max

[charliedixon]

Rendering on the highest spec Apple MacBook Pro 16-inch still taking painfully long.

M1 Max 64GB of memory taking over an hour to render at medium/high settings 2000x3000 resolution.

Seems like Stager is only using a fraction of the power my machine is capable of producing.

[JW4000]

This is bad news. The silence from Adobe on this is telling me we won't be seeing a chance on this soon either. between that mess with photoshop, with dimension, and now this, I'm really losing faith in adobe on their efforts to move ahead with 3d. It's sad too because these apps would be so helpful if thye were only useable! 

People have been complaining about this for some time now and Adobe has been very silent. 

[AlanGilbertson]

My reliable sources tell me that it won't be that long. The silence is because the entire team has been flat out for months and there isn't someone whose only job is monitoring forums and answering questions, much as we would like that. This is also going to change, however, according to my favorite grapevine, so there's a bit of light at the end of the tunnel.

[JW4000]

Curious if you've heard more on this? I'm really hoping it'll happen soon. Thanks 🙂 

[AlanGilbertson]

I haven't heard anything recently. They're a small team in the middle of a long blitz, and I'd rather they focus on that than take time out to chat. I send them anything I think might be useful in the way of log files and problem Stager scenes, because I still believe professional software requires a collaborative effort between its developers and the professionals who use it.

     That said, I am skeptical about the management echelons above the product team. We never hear from them. My sense is there are key people at that level who have lost touch with the broad range of actual customer needs, and who brush off the product team's effort to enlighten them.

     Any product team can end up caught between the fixed wrong ideas of management and the actual needs of users. It's happened with InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator on more than one occasion. Management over the design products was ready to drop Bridge entirely a few years back when it was still "owned" by the Photoshop team. The single most useful product in the entire CC suite was going to disappear because "noboby uses it." Totally out of touch.

     Felix and Dimension have never had the management or marketing support they needed. "Flatland" designers tend go cross-eyed when they meet the alien landscape of 3D. Without first-class training materials  to educate them, and a big marketing push to get them motivated, most (including me, for almost three years) decide it isn't worth the effort. Stager suffers from that lack of marketing insight.

     The entire category of "virtual photography," far less specific products like Stager, has barely been introduced to the design world at large. That leads to lack of demand, which leads to lack of support for the product team.

     Become an advocate. Keep posting here. Pretend you're writing directly to the Senior VP of Marketing or a mid-level manager. Give the Stager team ammunition: material they can show to management to demand more internal support. If enough people post enough specific use-cases, frustrations, problems, and needs, even the most obtuse manager will eventually get the message.

[AlanGilbertson]

Between emulation and lack of GPU support, that's not really a surprise. It happens that Nvidia was ready with their drivers and AMD/Apple were not, and nobody was ready with M1 support, so there's delay and understandable frustration in the Mac community. You're correct, in that Stager isn't currently able to access much of your machine's power. I tend to place the blame mostly on Apple. They could have worked sooner and harder to help developers with the transition and held off launch for a bit until the big professional apps were ready, but they didn't, and it's the professional users who suffer.

You can assume the Stager team has been flat out on M1 support (like every other team at Adobe, Autodesk, Solidworks,  and every other publisher of industrial-grade, cross-platform applications), but keep in mind they're a relatively small team and porting a large and complex app to M1 native code is a massive job. One does not simply walk into Mordor...

[JMathews · Accepted solution]

Hi everyone!  For M1 machines, Stager and Dimension both currently work on emulation mode, which indeed does not take advantage of the full power of the device.  The other Substance applications are indeed looking into M1 native support (Designer, Painter, and Sampler), but Stager is on a different architecture and has some more complex questions.  I can't say anything more about whether it will or will not happen in any set period of time.  I know it isn't reassuring, but we do understand the M1 devices are not well supported.

[MantaRay100]

I thought for sure I would be moving from Keyshot Pro to Substance 3D because of all the resources Adobe has to put behind a product. Reading the comments it looks like Substance is a long, long way off from being useful on my maxed out M1 MacBook Pro. Looks like I'll still be on Keyshot Pro for a long time to come.

[JW4000]

Really hoping for an update on M1 support in stager soon. If you happen to be in a position when you can share some news I'm sure there are many people that would greatly appreciate it. 

[MantaRay100]

I'm still waiting on Adobe to allow the importing of CAD files into Stager in the trial version so I can see how it handles them. I won't buy before I see how it does that. As it stands, you can't even get an enterprise trial with this function because they haven't created one yet.

It feels like Adobe was just filling a hole in their catalog, but then they abandoned the project when it was harder than they thought it would be. Hope I'm wrong, but the lack of tutorials on YouTube makes it look like it's not a priority anymore.

[mad_muppet]

It sure seems like Adobe has little or no respect for the community around these applications. I guess the sales numbers must not be what was expected? Last I knew, you folks made it difficult or nearly impossible to buy/subscribe to Stager if one already had a Substance Painter sub (even a free trial one). 

Was that ever fixed, incidentally? Could be why there's a sales slump.

Anyhow, yes, it's pretty deeply disappointing how little budget these apps seem to have when they're brand new acquisitions/offerings. Why did Adobe bother to acquire them just to almost ignore them?

[JW4000]

You're probably right about disappointing numbers. Of course, releasing a product this impractical affects sales too. I'm really hoping they come around and make some much needed updates; a 3d suite geared fir graphic designers is sorely needed. But right now it's a let down. I hope it doesn't go the way of photoshop 3d and get quietly dropped. Though photoshop 3d deserved it. 

[JW4000]

HI there. it's been more than nine months now, is there any word on M1 support outside of emulation mode? I feel like Adobe us in full-on PR with this and not giving its users a fair assessment of what's happening. I'd still really like to use the Adobe 3d suite, but holding out for it is becoming a bit of a joke now, isn't it? 9 months and no updates on stager? and yes I know there's other apps that support it but without stager support it's nothing. I'd really appreciate some real updates on this. Thanks 🙂 
(recognozing you're not directly responsible for this, you're just the Adobe person in the chat) 

[J-D-F]

It's 2023 and the reliable sources were wrong. Adobe’s continuing failure to address M1 bugs is glaring, and the hardware is just getting older. It's a good thing Adobe still gets paid monthly!

[Eliot2558113459as]

Hello from 2024! Still doing hour-long renders that should take 10 min LOL. We've 3D modeled all of our products in-house and are using AI to create backgrounds to stage product shots and enviromental shots, it's an awesome new world. However, this M1 Ultra Mac Studio (which is actually very fast at everything else) will probably be replaced before Stager runs native on Mac. Our journey to this new, creative workflow came out of necessity, at first we thought we'd hit a wall but 6 months and 100s of renders later it's clear that 3D/AI is the new normal and we'll be doing more and more of it. Our plan is to hold as-is, skip the M2 chip generation and hope by the time M3 rolls around this is fixed. If not, it's time to consider using different hardware, and sorry Adobe.... new software as well. Adobe seems to be moving away from the creatives that made them and there's other options for 3D staging software that are much less buggy. We're already using Fusion to create our models, we'll be exploring software that more seamlessly intergrates textures used in staging into motion graphics. Right now Adobe is way behind. After effects will import your models but not your materials for instance... so as of now it's usless. We'll see, Adobe has about 1-2 years tops to sort this out before they miss their opportunity to enter this market. 

[Volker Lannert]

I´m in a stager test phase with the newest M4 Pro 14/20 an must say ... it´s a nogo.

Stage is a mostly nice program, but on macs it is way too slow for everything.

For that monthly price I can and will not use ist.