Looking for insight to speed up the playback of animation in the viewport.

brownedave2

So, my problem is that when I am playing back animation, the viewport only updates frames at about 2fps.  This makes it remarkably difficult to do any kind of animation process.

I have:  

Made invisible every item in the scene other than the base characters themselves (there are three) - besides the characters, there is only clothing and hair.

Decimated the characters meshs by a significant factor.  (about 30% of the base mesh)

I am using a viewmode that shows no textures.  

I have further reduced all textures in the scene by a factor of 16x, just in case.  reopening the software after doing this.

Further, I have display optimization set to Best, and have otherwise run through the interface tab trying to tweak settings for improvement.

I am running with a GTX 1080 graphics card.

The anoying thing is that even after doing all of this, it plays back at the same speed as when I am looking at high res meshes with full res textures.  What gives?  What am I doing wrong here?  What is slowing my computer down so much that it can't display the frames?  

 

Phatmartino

brownedave2 said:

So, my problem is that when I am playing back animation, the viewport only updates frames at about 2fps.  This makes it remarkably difficult to do any kind of animation process.

I have:  

Made invisible every item in the scene other than the base characters themselves (there are three) - besides the characters, there is only clothing and hair.

Decimated the characters meshs by a significant factor.  (about 30% of the base mesh)

I am using a viewmode that shows no textures.  

I have further reduced all textures in the scene by a factor of 16x, just in case.  reopening the software after doing this.

Further, I have display optimization set to Best, and have otherwise run through the interface tab trying to tweak settings for improvement.

I am running with a GTX 1080 graphics card.

The anoying thing is that even after doing all of this, it plays back at the same speed as when I am looking at high res meshes with full res textures.  What gives?  What am I doing wrong here?  What is slowing my computer down so much that it can't display the frames?  

 

Hey hey, I'm no expert and I'm sure others could and hopefully will be able to help more than I, but a couple questions...

1. Have you tried making only one of the three Figures visible to see how smoothly the animation works compared to having all 3? It could just be the number of calculations that have to be made to change tons of parameters for three Figures every 1/30th of a second (assuming you're using 30fps), as the Frames fly by isn't going to happen...

2. Is there any chance you have Mesh Smoothing on any Figures? I know most probably don't use it, but on the off chance, that could really bog down the viewport as well...

3. Have you tried deleting everything from the scene except for the three figures (not just made everything else invisible), to see if that makes any difference? There's a lot of wonky stuff that DS does along the lines of calculating things you're not expecting, contrary to how you may have set things up...

WendyLuvsCatz

in preferences disable all the extra stuff for the openGL preview too

brownedave2

I have tried with a more minimal set up, with only one of the characters in the scene.  It does play faster, so certainly the fact that there are three is an element of the problem.  Though, it is still faster only by a bit.  possibly 6fps with a single character and nothing else in the scene (asside from invisible clothing).   

I did have mesh smoothing on some of the clothing as it turns out, thanks for that tip.  I've turned it off now - no noticible improvment unfortunatly.   

Aside from the characters + invisible clothing, there is nothing else in the scene.  After deleting the clothing it has been improved a bit more - I may have achieved 8 frames per second.  I guess making somthing invisible doesn't remove that element from calculation?  I wish there was a way to tag somthing to be outside of consideration for calculation beside deleting it.  For that matter, it should be possible to do animation with some kind of massivley simplified rig that is linked to a more complex rig for rendering - no way of doing that I guess.  Seems like it would be a pretty simple thing to implement. Just some simple animation puppet that can be tagged to some previously set up character model at render time.  Maybe I should do a feature request?  Is there any way to do any thing like this at all?  It seems like such a simple database maniulation task at software level.  You know what I mean, I should be able to have 100's of simple skeletons animated in the scene where only at render time does any of the detail get considered.  I don't care if it takes 10 minutes to render a frame then, it's a pain in the butt when it takes extra time to render on the screen when I am actualy trying to work with the model though.  

I disabled the other open GL stuff, the per pixel, the anti aliasing, and the backface shading.  Hasn't made much of a difference, but maybe a bit?  Thank you in any case.

Moviehawk

Had similar problems trying to animate G8 female. Preview was slower than mud!

I ended up creating a separate content directory - having only 1-2 g8 characters and a handful of morph packages installed to use for animations. I first tried unistalling 40+ G8 characters and morphs, but still ran slow. 

As a test - try running your animations against a g2 or g3 character, one that does not have as many character/morph sets installed. See if they run faster in preview mode.

Daz loads all the morphs for characters based on what you have installed. This has been a common complaint regarding daz taking a long time to load some characters - especially G8.

There may be better/different ways to accomplish this, but with my reduced runtime I can get G8 to preview animations in almost real-time. (your hardware will also make a big difference).