Maximum number of parts on import?

[richardfunnell]

Is there a maximum number of unique parts that can be imported from a single file?

I took a point cloud file, imported it into Blender, and used the particle system to assign a 20-sided polysphere to each vertex. This worked fine at 100,000 particles (only 2 million polygons) and imported slowly but worked. Next, bumping it up to 250k & 350k particles leaves me with a stalled import @ the "Merging Parts" progress bar. System memory usage is less than 15% of total 64GB, and it seems relatively flat. KeyShot also seems to be using only a single thread for whatever it's doing, but it doesn't seem to be doing much.
They're all distinct parts, so each comes in with a unique material name and material.

Any idea on limits for this kind of operation?

[richardfunnell]

Update: I managed to import the 500k parts for a total of 10 million polygons. I had to leave it overnight, but it worked!
I'll have to do some optimization within Blender, because importing a file overnight isn't really a good solution :/

[richardfunnell]

I ended up testing 1m parts; 16+ hours of import time and I was never able to get past the "Merging Parts" dialog on two different systems.

Would love to be able to import the point cloud file instead and assign instanced/reference geometry instead. Doing this in Blender is surprisingly fast, even set to 500k or 1m instances. I don't want to render my scenes there but getting this done in KeyShot may not be possible for me.