I love using blender but more times than not my computer lags to the extreme due to having a bad computer. my computer isn’t crappy nor that old but its not really built for handling many things happening at once. mostly it’s for documents and other non graphics card depending things. I’m not tech savy so i have no idea if this is true but Im guessing that blender is a pretty big program what with also having a game engine, modeling, and cycles it sometimes can depend heavily on the graphics card when using things such as baking or making particles. (again, i’m not the best at knowing these kinds of things)
so, are there any programs out there that are solely made for 3d animations that lets you import blender models (and maybe the rigs as well) into them? if there are then that would greatly help! and to give you a idea of what i usually do, the animations i do use simple low poly models that use cell shading (mostly toon animations) and don’t use many, if any, particles.
If you are dealing mainly with low poly models for toon animations and are experiencing significant lag, then I really would just recommend upgrading your computer. These days you can buy a decent laptop on eBay for just a $100.
Blender, despite having an enormous array of functionality, is actually an extremely lean hunk of code, weighing in at only 109 MB. Sure you can probably find something else out there just for animation/rigging, the odds that it will run better are very slim. I know a guy who is running Blender on a machine with 1.5 GB of ram and a 1.2 Ghz i3 1st gen and he says it barely slows him down. But he has trouble running things like Word and PowerPoint though, go figure.
Make sure your machine doesn’t have any “virus protection” freeze-ware on it, open up Task Manager to ensure none of your RAM/Disk/Processor levels are abnormal, and if none of that is awry, just get a new PC not built out of something other than sticks and stones
Not everything is about the software; as noted Blender is very light and despite having the game engine etc. it won’t necessarily impact your work as much as what you are doing and how you are doing it. Start looking at optimizing your work and workflow. Post some examples of those, maybe someone here can point to a few things to make it work better.
As a general rule, rigs are specific to the program it’s made in (Maya rigs won’t work in Blender, Blender rigs won’t work in 3DS Max, etc).
As others have said, if your computer can’t handle the graphics then you may need to optimize your scene. Try separating out pieces of your scene into different layers and turn the layers off that you’re not working on at the moment.
that’s a good tip, haven’t tried that yet. but I also suggest where I always get slowed down the script’s that run in the UV editor having conditional’s slow’s down the texturing process. So I tend to trim down operation’s in the uv editor script’s that I don’t use. Probably my fault though, I reverted the python GIL from 3.2 to 3.1 in the blender code so I could link the latest blender’s python binding’s to my system wide python3.1 build, which makes the memory harbor smaller segment’s of hard drive blocks per dynamic link as compared to the entire static lib embedded in the binary). Oh and you should see what a smart disk compatibile client says about your hard drive buffering statistics.
