Blender question- re: armature/deformation calculations

Hi!

I’ve recently been experimenting with armatures and rigging under Cycles Render on Blender. While my PC (Intel I7-4790 @ 3.6Ghz, 32GRam, AMD Radeon R9 200 series graphics card) hasn’t experienced any speed issues in using the other features in Blender, I had found that when I go into ‘Pose Mode’ and attempt to reposition my armature, I experience a noticeable slowdown (Windows Task Manager indicates roughly a 25% increase in CPU and Memory during this) in processing. I also notice a similar slowdown or delay in response while in ‘weight paint’ mode.

I currently do not have Blender (2.78) running in ‘GPU Compute’ mode as my current card does not support OpenCL. Would upgrading my card help with this issue, or should I be looking/checking something else?

Thanks!
David

Are you posing/rigging/weight painting using cycle preview ? with cycles rendering in the viewport ?
If it’s the case it’s logical behaviour here. Cycles need to do some scene conversion everytime the geometry is modified. And it’s not realtime interaction here. You should do all that stuff in material preview and once it’s OK check how it behave in render preview if needed…

First of all, thanks for answering…

Well, I’m pretty sure I’m not doing all that under Cycles preview (that would be shift-Z, correct?) I usually set up after selecting the body or armature object by going through the Object Interaction mode selector to access the pose/edit/weight modes.

I think though you might be onto something about the issue being more on the logistics side. In order to rig the body, I’ve had to join together several objects (arms, legs, hair, etc)a, creating a rather large final object. This is where I started noticing the slowdowns.

In fact, recently I had to edit the weights on areas of the body- some of them were obscured by other areas, so I had to use Select Linked/Separate to break out and hide some meshes in other layers so I could access hidden objects/meshes to edit their mesh weights. In doing so, I’ve noticed a significant decrease in response time when editing the weights.

So yes- I’d agree that it sounds like I’m ‘doing something wrong’ in that I need to perform better ‘mesh management’ (for lack of a more proper term). If there are accepted practices for this, I haven’t run across anything about them yet.

Sorry for the late reply…
Ok, that may come from too many vertice/poly to manage , if you can post a few screenshot that would be obvious to tell you…
Being able to animate at 25/30fps is quite a challenge with a complex rig and a lot of geometry involved.
Blender is not the best ATM to handle dense meshes , but this issue of managing complex character is common to all soft.

When dealing with simple cartoon characters the simple solution is to lower the subdivisions (subsurf) for animation (but that can be also for rigging and skinnig) and use higher subdivisions for the final …

When you have a mechanical character or organic with lot of props/dressing, lowering subdivisions may be not sufficient or doable.

On a real production you may have a lowpoly character that is used for animation, and a high poly for rendering. In blender you can also disable some feature (modifiers, number of particules) in the viewport and activate them for rendering.

All that said, even if you have a highpoly character it should still be manageable to rig or skin. I guess you haven’t paid attention at the polycount when modeling/rigging your character.

Don’t hesitate to post 2/3 picture of the mesh so we can advice you better !

Good luck !

Well, I don’t know what I did but I did something that improved the response time- I did find some extraneous objects by looking through the Outliner, and after having deleted said objects I found the response time in the Weight Paint and Pose Modes improved significantly. And you were right about not watching the polycount… after reading your reply I checked my current polycount and it’s around 500K for verts and faces - tris are around 1M. I do remember the counts for the verts and faces being MUCH higher than that before the cleanup (I seem to remember the figure being 1.5M each :open_mouth: )…

Ow… correct that. I pulled up a old backup file of my character and it gives Verts/Faces/Tris as 2.3M/2.3M/4.5M :open_mouth:

So actually I think I fixed the issue, but with all the unused garbage I had to clear out (admittedly from doing appends/copies and assorted fatfinger mistakes) I would think there would be a utility/plugin that could do that? I know there’s ‘Remove Doubles’ feature in Blender, but that only goes so far. It would be nice if there’s a plugin or external app that could look through a *.blend file and do an analysis on it…

Anyway, thanks for the help!