I have a Linux box running RH8.0 and is my primary Blender machine. While I was importing a model, I noticed that rotating the scene was more sluggish than it should be. To verify, I opened the blacksmith.blend file, performed the standard blenchmark drawing test, and discovered that Blender was not using the GL acceleration. However, blender-creator 2.23 does use it. I cannot figure out what the problem might be, as I’ve verified the existence of the linked GL-related libraries. Any ideas?
Weird…after much dorking around (including the download of the dynamic version of 2.26, just to be sure), it appears that the problem isn’t the GL acceleration, it’s the timer/drawing code associated with CTRL-ALT-T. Turns out the scene I was working with was just as sluggish in 2.23 as it was in 2.26. I haven’t figured out why the presence of an armature (linked to a mesh) can bring a scene to a crawl.
from other posts (those of teeth on particles on armature deformed meshes) it seems that armature deformation is recaluclated when the scene is drawn (or thereabouts), unlike nearly every thing else which is precalculated.
armature deformation is qute demanding (compared to a single loc/rot/scale), especially with variable vertex weights. (look sometime at the video cards doing reasonable soft skinning at a reasonable framerate, realtime. they sure beat mine… and I imagine that blender does it in software)