I made key shapes for two objects and animated them both from frame 1 to 50. Animation player is at 5 fps at most. And for some reason when I click in my armature object it says my model has 86.936 verts, which makes no sense since my character mesh has about 3.300 verts.
I’ve already checked for any kind of ghost mesh I might have created by accident but could no find anything.
ps: Forum won’t allow me to upload my blend file yet.
As I can see there might be a “Lattice” object in your outliner window. Which means that if you try to make vertex mutation at runtime with a modifier you will experience the effect of slow down. Most common case when animating is to turn off all modifiers (in the viewport but not in render) so you get more speed that way.
Another case of getting thousands of vertices is perhaps with the subdivision modifier active, though the base model is 3000verts the modifier will actually output literally the double or quadruple. Also the counter might add up every possible object in the scene not only one mesh specifically, so you get to see every vertex count from every mesh.
However I still not have a proper answer to give yet, I can only speculate based on most common cases. 
Post your blend file to Pasteall then post the URL to your file here…
We can then look for errors. Bear in mind the animations are not going to run at full speed if your PC resources don’t match your mesh’s requirements, You should look to render the animations to a video, or frame image files that can be built into a video using VSE in Blender.
Indeed, I’m using a lattice modifier in my character’s non-spherical eye socket (and eyelids). It was the only way I found to keep the right shape of the eye parts as they rotate. This modifier has caused me a lot of trouble to set this eye right (and it still causes me some issues, like not being able to properly mirror the lattice object to make the other eye… I had to move tem eye and the lattice around until it looked better, but not perfect). The character body mesh (no eye parts included) right now has 3,116 vertices, I don’t think blender is taking into account the subdivision surface modifier (it has not been applied).
I plan to bring this model and it’s animations to a game engine, which means poly count shouldn’t be higher than 10k verts. If lattice modifier is causing this and there’s another way to make non-spherical eyes work without this ridiculous amount of extra vertices I really would like to know how.
Thanks. I’ll do this and send the link.
Blender is taking the subdiv into account for the 87k vert count. That’s the source of all those verts. A modifier does not need to be applied to be active. In fact, applying the modifier would improve performance (but that alone is not enough reason to apply it.)
If you want it running at 3k vert speed, disable the subdiv modifier, or set it to 0 preview levels. (Properties/render/simplify has some useful tools to do this in a more automatic way for entire scenes.)
I deleted the modifier in the body mesh and verts count remained the same. It might be some kind of bug…
enabled but invisible objects also account in those statistics
Delete all unnecessary/hidden meshes you will see the reported numbers will go down.
Look at your vert count when I set all objects to subdivision 0:
The body itself is only responsible for about half of your verts; when disabling subdiv on it alone, your count drops only to 40k, and you can see that currently, we have 7k even though your body only has 3k. That’s because there are additional objects in the scene (that also have subdiv.)
are you doing an animation of courage the cowardly dog?
Yes!! I’ll be making an animation short for a school project based on episode 1 season 1!
You’re right. I deleted all subdivision surface modifiers and I still got about 7k verts. When I recounted it seemed there was around 1k vertices I did not find. I wasn’t counting the controllers shapes though, I don’t this they had a significant amounts of verts. I’m surprised subdivision surface, even at it’s lowest render/viewport values can increase my 3k verts mesh up to 16k… that’s unexpected. I wish there was a subsurface division modifier with a bit less verts creation
