Tutorial/Tips on optimizing your Blender project, renders, and editing.

Hello! This is a simplified tutorial/bag of tips in regards to optimizing your Blender projects and getting the most out of your workstation.

I did not feel that this was detailed and organized enough to be included in the actual tutorials page. If a moderator does find this sufficient enough, please do move it there. Thank you.

This tutorial will be sort of separated into subcategories, if I feel that it is significantly different than the previous and or next topic.

The most important part will come first;

Optimizing your;

*workspace and scenes-

This is the most important part, as some projects require real-time playback for quick and accurate feedback on your animation.

-Decrease polygon model detail/remove unnecessary polygons.

Generally speaking, if you do not see polygon(s) in a given scene at all in the final render, it’s best removed so your system has room for more important elements, like faces!

Any and every model can have less polygons, it’s not always noticeable with a few polygons removed and replaced by less, and distant buildings for example can be replaced by rectangles with detailed textures.

-Simulate more detailed elements

This is not necessarily the easiest task, but when used wisely, can yield shocking results.

For example, if a character is not usually close to the camera and or the final resolution of the image/video is rather low, you can simply replace the top and bottom sets of teeth of your character(s) with what is essentially a flat piece of paper with a picture of teeth on it. It would probably be around 12 polygons for a top or bottom set, that is triangulated.

Interiors do not always have to be modeled, you can simply have a picture of an interior behind the window of a building so that it appears that there is an interior, this works best with distant buildings.

Almost every time you can get away with flat, 2D ropes and wires, such as telephone wires. This kind of thing can be done in many ways, but my favorites include;

A giant square with a picture of a wire/rope on it. Only 2 polygons! But has the limitation of being viewable at side angles and not DIRECTLY above and underneath.

A relatively low polygon rope or chord, usually about 8 polygons total from start to finish (triangulated) We also copy each rectangle and rotate it 90 degrees so that it is viewable from both the top and side angles. Though this can look strange when very very close to the object and in advanced lighting situations.

And finally, objects like trees and bushes that are in the distance can just be 2D rectangles that have transparent images of trees/bushes on them and face the camera at all times, without rotating on the X or Y axis.

-This is very important, so I decided to bold it; ABUSE THE LAYERS SYSTEM! That's right, you do not have to view or even render the entire scene in one go, you can move specific objects of any kind to a different "layer" so that you can only let your system process and render what is in the current layer.

After that you can render the every layer at once so that they are connected in the final image.

Especially on ancient CPUs and smelly integrated graphics chipsets, it is best to animate characters on different layers and occasionally checking if they “interact” properly. You can also animate blocks identically to the skeleton of each model so that you can more accurately determing where a character is on a different layer, REMEMBER NOT TO ATTACH AND OR RIG IT TO THE SKELETON OR IT WILL RESULT IN GLITCHES AND OR PERFORMANCE ISSUES.

-Decreasing the amount of bones also helps, no face requires bones to animate, it just takes more time to animate and edit facial expressions with the shape keys to achieve the same result, if animated fluidly.

We will conclude this section with subdivision and a background trick.

Subdivision is used to simulate polygons and in my opinion is a crutch to finish a project quicker. In other cases, it is necessary to round objects perfectly like balls and circles and in specific cases of trying to create odd objects.

Subdivision should be avoided like the plague, it will DESTROY rendering times on slower systems and absolutely cripple viewport performance. This method should really only be used for the specific reasons above, if you’re on a time crunch, or if you are a less experienced modeler and want to quickly smoothen your models.

Finally we have a background trick, how this is done is; You model a background for your scene, and either;
Render it as an image, or animate it and render it as an UNCOMPRESSED video.

After that, you place the image on a flat rectangle fitting the aspect ratio of your camera, and tape it to the camera, so that if follows it everywhere. So using the same camera animation if you had one for the background, animate the character or object in front of the background before and render! Keep in mind this demolishes any and all possibilities of using shadows accurately unless you include the floor in both versions of the render.

*Rendering

This seems to be the part most have the most difficulty with, if the former wasn’t difficult enough.

Never be afraid to lower samples of everything in your scene until you can balance visuals with render time. Also do not be afraid to lower the render resolution to even an odd resolution that is close to what you are trying to get, and of course, play with anti-aliasing types to balance sharpness with smooth edges. I can’t tell you how many times I have seen renders that appear to have sauce all over the screen making everything unpleasantly blurry.

*Final basic system tips-

-In User Preferences you can disable text anti-aliasing, and decrease the DPI size, which helps dramatically with performance and the next tip;

-Decrease your screen resolution, usually for really old/weak setups 640x480 or 800x600 works best, even 720p with more powerful graphics cards, ideally all you need is a GeForce 6200 to achieve even 1360x768 with zero differences in performance to lower resolutions.

And that’s all! If you think your system is slow and or old, I perform 95% of my work on the system in my signature, which, if in case I change it (which is near impossibly unlikely) I have specified them here, though in this version, I disinclude my graphics card as I have tested the onboard graphics countless times I have done fine with it.

Lowest end system tested in the 2.6x versions;

(Newest version stable and best performing on this pc was 2.63)

Custom Biostar Slot 1/Socket 370 hybrid PC:
CPU: Intel Pentium iii (Katmai) (Slot 1) (512KB L2 Cache)

(This CPU is simply a Pentium ii 450Mhz with a slightly higher clock speed and includes the addition of SSE instructions, which is required for the 2.6x versions of Blender, I have also tried the 566Mhz Socket 370 Celeron Coppermine which is worth mentioning due to its 128KB of L2 cache)

RAM: 64MB DDR 100Mhz RAM
GPU: Intel 82810 Graphics 32MB (very, very slow)
HDD: 10GB IDE Seagate (When Seagate was a reliable brand, lol),

Also the drive does not specify speed, but I would assume around 4000RPM.

OS: Windows XP SP2 32-Bit

Hi Miss Tiacht,

Thank you so much for taking the time to post all these useful tips, I feel we are kindred spirits when it comes to our desire to want to optimize our workflows. In fact the first computer that I started programming on was a Sinclair Spectrum 128K, so I’m no stranger to the world of squeezing every last drop out of my computer :wink:

Here is the spec of the computer I’ve used for all my WC images
AMD Athlon 64 3000+| 2.00Ghz | 512MB RAM | 2 HD 75GB & 40GB | ATI Radeon 9550 256MB

I think I might have been able to get a better computer from another skip, but well you know, where’s the fun in that :slight_smile:

I’m using WinXP and 2.76b and the only real issue I’ve run into is sadly I’m unable to comb hair with the ‘Limit Selection To Visible’ enabled. Honestly I’ve not tested older versions to see if it works in one of them, so I should do that. I have played around with pretty much all of Blender settings, but I’ve had no joy :frowning:

On an up side, I have done motion tracking and video editing on it, so Blender rocks! :slight_smile:

I should point out that I do have another computer which is a Dell XPS 600 with a Pentium D 3Ghz and 3GB RAM however there is a problem with the motherboard so it keeps turning off all the time. Really you would think somebody like me who has studied microelectronics in college would be able to fix the problem, but sadly it was a long time ago and I don’t have any test equipment or soldering iron and I did fall asleep a lot in class ;-). What was a little scary though, was the people that were the laziest in my class went on to do avionics.

All the best,
Damien

Sweet specs you have there! I was trying to get a system together with that CPU for GTA IV but I did not have a board with the right socket…

Thanks for your response and positive feedback! I try to be a positive influence onto the Blender community as aids-ey as I may seem. I also try to be a positive influence on the gaming and tech community, but I’m a one lady army, and it’s difficult to prove a point when developers just want their lives to be easier and just not bother optimizing their software and just force obsolesce.

I have some huge projects planned with my ancient beast, I just need to somehow overcome my lack of motivation and try to put the past cruelty that has been inflicted upon me years back when I opened up and tried to be an entertainer on YouTube.