Hi folks,
I have a project I’ve been playing around with off and on for a few years now. It’s an ornithopter that I’m finally trying to animate. Due to the complexity of the armature (it has 310 bones) it takes a long time to render each frame. When I start the animation, it looks more like a slide show. The result is that I’m having trouble smoothing out the animation. I can’t get an accurate picture of the location of things or the way they will look on the final version. I first tried it using cycles just to see how it went knowing that it would take forever. It did. My next try, I set up a separate scene that uses the internal renderer. That took about half the time but was still too slow. Third, I turned off all of the layers except the armature which helped but not enough. My question is, is it possible to put the bones of an armature on different layers so I can animate just the basic skeleton but still have everything attached and, if so, is there a tutorial I can use to get some examples? Thanks in advance.
You can put an Armature on a separate layer from the object it effects… and hide that layer…
Note also… bones … bones within their own Armature also have their own Layers… separate from Object layers…
generally speaking however… bones are very very ‘light’ on rendering… and should not really slow down your animations that much…
Hey, thanks norvman for the input. Based on your statement that bones are light on rendering, I created a new empty file and appended just the rig. When I run the sequence in that file with Alt-A it runs in real time. In the original file, I have the armature and the mesh on separate layers and only display the one with the rig but it’s as if blender is still calculating the position of the vertices even when the mesh is in on a layer that isn’t displayed. Are you aware of a way to deactivate that without having to disconnect the rig from the mesh?
So let me understand what your saying because I’m not exactly clear on it… So you imported (Appended) just the Rigg into a new file then ran the animation… and everything ran at good speed…
If this is the case then obviously the Rigg is not causing the slow down…
You must have some other modifier on the mesh or something (physics maybe?) that Blender is calculating…
Let me ask you this about the mesh… have you checked to see that you do not have duplicate Vertex groups? …
if you have Applied the Rigg to the Mesh using Crtl-P and used automajic weights more than once… then you will have more than one set of vertex groups in that mesh…
I’m betting at this point that what this is… (it sure sounds like it) as I have had this happen to me more than once…
To check it… Select your Mesh… Then Properties Panel … Object Data(Triangle Icon)… Vertex Groups… look at the names… do you have duplicates in there? if so that’s what is happening is Blender is having a hard time figuring out which Vertex group you want it to use…
Pick the ones you don’t want and hit ‘x’ to delete them …
plus…
next to the Vertex Group Window you will see a Black down arrow click on it and you will see some options on dealing with these extra Vertex Groups…
Anyway this may not be what it is but this is what I would check next…
What norvman said, plus a few other things:
Turn off modifiers that’s not needed. Subsurf level 1 adds 4x the number of faces, level 2 is 16x the number of faces. Subsurf has 2 levels, one for viewing while working, and one for rendering. The view setting can be set to 0 while animating. (As a side note, I once saw a file with view set to 4, rendering set to 2. This makes no sense, since the character appears nicer while working than when rendered.) There are probably other modifiers that are not needed while working to animate, just can’t think of them at the moment…
Obviously, don’t have it set to display textures in the 3d view, that slows it down as well. Minimize the amount of animation panels you have open - having a dopesheet, f-curve editor, and time line all displayed while previewing the animation means blender has 3 more panels it has to update along with the 3d view, that take processor power.
You can also do open gl renderings to check your work. The icon looks like a clapboard in the 3d view’s header. This renders the 3d view as you see it and it renders a lot faster than BI.
Another trick if you want to view your animation in real-time in the 3d view would be to simply replace your mesh with a low poly one. 6 faces and 8 verts, a slim rectangle can replace a hi-poly wing section. Simple cubes scaled to replace the hi poly mesh will suffice. You should be able to create a low poly copy with about 1000 verts, and if that doesn’t flow smoothly in real time in the 3d view, you might want to upgrade your computer.
Randy
Hi revolt_randy,
Thanks a lot. You hit the nail on the head. If I turn off the dope sheet and the subsurf modifier, the animation runs in real time even with the mesh. If I turn on either one it slows way down and if they’re both on I might as well go get a cup of coffee.
Hey norvman,
Thanks for the tip on the duplicate vertex groups. I ran into that when I was modeling this project but it didn’t occur to me that it might cause problems during animation. I’ll keep that in mind in the future.
BTW: If anybody is interested, I threw a test animation up on You Tube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2p_ea2ACdWQ that shows the jerkyness I’m trying to get rid of.
Anyway, you’ve both been tremendous help. Thanks.
Hey there,
I thought I’d post a follow up in case anyone stumbles across this thread trying to find a way to speed up the UI when fine tuning an animation. I discovered that if I click the arrow button with the text hint “Only include channels relating to selected objects and data” (next to the ghost) in both the dope sheet and the graph editor, I can leave them both open and still get full speed from the animation as long as I select the mesh instead of the armature before I start running it.
Happy blending.
Thank you for your contribution 
That’s useful to know