By Steve White (Hrgiger) (24.95.88.69) on Friday, February 07, 2003 - 03:18 am:

I'm just wondering why in Layout when I select a bone to animate, Layout slows to a crawl. Once I select a new object, like a model layer, light, or whatever else, it starts zipping along again. Why would that be? It's reallly annoying. It even does it when I have the bounding box threshold set very low so that when anything is moved, it turns to bounding box mode. It never used to do that. I'm using an ACS4 rig and the model has a handful of expressions tied to it (in addition to the ones already in the ACS4 rig). Any ideas? I just downloaded the latest driver from NVIDIA for my card and that didn't make a difference. It's really making animating almost unbearable.

By Larry Shultz "SplineGod" (Larrys) (209.179.51.10) on Friday, February 07, 2003 - 05:43 am:

Try turning off "use morphed positions" and turn on "faster bones"
Heres a few tips to speed things up:
1. Set your subpatch level low
2. Set your subdivision order to first while animating and last when rendering.
3. Turn off unused channels
4. Avoid multiple goal IK chains
5. Use simple IK chains ie. terminated chains (unaffected by IK)
6. Use proxy objects
7. Set bounding box threshold to a low value.
8. Change IK settings in experimental panel.
9. Shrink your layout interface.
10. Update the drivers for your GFX card and/or tweak the settings for it.
11. Under Scene---Globals----enable deformations on/off. This will turn ALL deformations on and off with a hot key. It speeds things up a lot as well.
12. Get Faster CPU.

By Steve White (Hrgiger) (24.95.88.69) on Friday, February 07, 2003 - 08:55 am:

Actually Larry, excpet for gettin a faster CPU (which I'd love to do right now but money is always a factor, even if it's just a few hundred-in fact, I just bought a GeForce 4 card to replace my GeForce 2 card. It's helped in my redraw speeds in modeler in Layout but not in this case) I already had done most everything you mentioned above. I'm not a total newbie anymore . In fact, I already did mention that I had the bounding box set low and got my latest driver from NVIDIA in my post question above.

Actually, I think I found the problem which brings me to another question. The reason for the slowdown was the expressions I had applied to the arms for smartskinning purposes. My quesion is, can I just unapply the expressions to the bones while I'm animating and then just apply them to the scene before I render? I'm assuming I could, I don't see any reason that I wouldn't be able to, but I did hope someone could confirm that first before I spend a few days animating without them.

By Steve White (Hrgiger) (24.95.88.69) on Friday, February 07, 2003 - 11:54 am:

Ok, let me add a revision in here. It's not the expressions at all. I did an experiment and left the expressions out of the rig and it still slows down.
Strange thing, it only happens when I select the arm bones.
?

Legs are controlled by IK and don't suffer a slowdown. Arms are FK and they do. Nothing else slows down the interface. Spine, hips, head target.... everything else works ok, it's just the arm bones.

By Phil Braaten (Phillydee) (4.46.195.174) on Friday, February 07, 2003 - 04:44 pm:

Not really a solution, but....
I've found in the past that if I use the expression string "vmag(extent([A B]))" with IK(for the muscle bones--where A is the bone and B is the ik goal for that muscle setup)and have multiple muscle setups it would bring my character to a crawl--and many crashes...
don't know if that helps any, or if it's true to other's experiences(like Mike Blackbourn and his rigs)it's just my .02

PS and a question to Spline God: Does an excessive amount of weightmaps attached to different bones eat more CPU computation?

By Larry Shultz "SplineGod" (Larrys) (209.179.51.7) on Saturday, February 08, 2003 - 01:42 am:

Phil,
I havent noticed any myself. At some point it might.
One thing I do when rigging is just assume that things are going to slow down at some point. This is why you always see companies using standin characters when animating.
Once I add bones I check deformations.Once Im sure theyre ok then I switch to an animation mode where deformations are turned off.
What I do is create a chopped up version of my character that I use as a standin. I copy the original mesh with subpatches off. I then cut and paste the hands, forearms, head, neck, torso, etc etc into their own layers and save that as an object.
I load this layered character into layout and parent every part to a corresponding bone. I then make a selection set of the standin character.
While checking deformations on my subpatch character I make the standin character invisible.
Once Im sure its going to deform well I make the subpatch character invisible, the standin character visible and TURN OFF ALL DEFORMATIONS. There is a tool under the SCENE Tab under Globals in the Tool Bar called Enable Deformations. When that is off ALL deformations (bones, endos, deform plugins) are turned off. This speeds up everything tremendously.
So basically I have a check deformations mode and an animate mode. You can use lscript commander to perhaps speed this process up so you can easily switch from animation mode to deformations mode to check your deformations at any point.
For me part of rigging is to anticipate slowdowns and plan for them. This is one of the things I do to solve that problem.

By Steve White (Hrgiger) (24.95.88.69) on Sunday, February 09, 2003 - 12:03 pm:

Thanks to Lukasz Pazera. He let me know that turning off motion paths in Layout helps in the redraw speed.

See my problem wasn't that Layout was coming to a crawl. I already had done all the regular things to make animating faster. 0 subdivision, turneded off deformations, etc.. It was just happening on a few certain bones(arm bones in this case), everything else was fine. It seemed strange since the arms were with FK. I would think that the IK calculations would be more computationally expensive but I guess not. For whatever reason turning off motion paths in Layout was the only thing that made a difference.