How Should I Upgrade for Faster Animation / Baking In Viewport?

Support Animation and Rigging
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How Should I Upgrade for Faster Animation / Baking In Viewport?

P.S. focusing on animation and physics baking (cloth, hair) instead of rendering would be appreciated, please.

My situation:
When I render, CPU usage is 100%. So the bottleneck is obvious: CPU (or lack of GPU). Okay.

But for physics baking, CPU usage is only 50%
(Animation is ~75%).
Yet baking takes time.

So I’m confused. What’s the bottleneck? What should I buy?

I want faster baking and animation since it’s trial and error: How does it look? Could be better? Sure. Fix it. Is it good now? Fix it again.
But in reality, it takes time just to see what it looks like in the first place.

Thanks!

P.P.S. I know I can change Blender settings, but learning Blender is… not easy :stuck_out_tongue: Hardware upgrade would be easier.

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To overcome the render CPU bottleneck, why not try a fast Graphics Card, like an Nvidia GTX980, or GTX1080 if you are blessed with enough funds, and then use CUDA rendering.

You could post a blend file here for us to bench test on our machines - I use a 6-core AMD processor and a GTX980 GPU.

Xmas Cheers, Clock.

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If you are just rendering a test render to see how it looks, I would do a couple of things. I am assuming you are using cycles. You didn’t say or put in a blend to look at. If you are, try branched path tracing and cut down what you don’t need. Lower the samples a ton and resize the image so it is really small (ie. instead of 1920 x 1080, for testing I might use 15% of that. There is a slider on your resolution that you can easily change). For sample instances, you probably don’t need 4 sample instance for direct, cut it down to 1 or 2 for your test. If you don’t need SSS, turn it to 0, etc. As you become happier, increase the size of the render and the samples to get a better feel. For animation just use your play blast GLSL. As far as equipment, I render on my game machine, it is a I7 4790K. I sometime use my graphics card, but I don’t have a super fast one so I normally keep it on the CPU. Also my scene sizes tend to blow out my 4K graphics card.

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Thanks for your replies. Didn’t know about playblast! Thanks, stilltrying! (I’m still trying, too).

ANIMATION:
I have integrated graphics :expressionless: Thinking of buying a GPU.
But I use Blender Render… (cuz I want it to look like a cartoon cuz I can’t draw lol, but cycles is too grainy and 3D looking. Then again, I don’t even know how to use nodes texture stuff).

Edit: .blend file now attached. Never mind the whacky shirt (it has no physics) (or the uh… pointy parts. Didn’t have time to hide those…).
But do comment on the jagged pants!

P.S. I kinda cheated with the pants by making the underpants the same colour.

How long does it take you to playblast / bake?

CPU usage for playblasting (NOT pre-baked) was around 57%
How do I use 100%???
It was baking at ~1 frame per MINUTE. No rendering nor freestyle.

My CPU: Intel Core i3-370M @ 2.40GHz, 2 cores.
Cpubenchmark score: 2,025. Nothing compared to your 11,000 CPU lol.

But I wanna bake as I go. Cuz if I animate 30,000 frames, and THEN find out knees are poking through pants, or clothes are super-jagged for some reason (low quality physics?)…

Maybe I’ll use a lower fps and time remapping to lessen the burden, since I don’t like super-smooth animation anyways.

As for rendering… ask me later cuz this post is long. Sorry!

Let me know, please,

  • sdhy

P.S. character modified from a model created using Manuel Bastioni Lab v1.3. http://www.manuelbastioni.com/
Convenient for amateurs! Thanks, Manuel!
Manuel’s profile: https://blenderartists.org/forum/member.php?148-Manuel

P.P.S. GTX 980. Wow. That’s near the top on blenchmark!

Attachments

clothes to animate TUT CLOTH SETTINGS, NO BAKE.blend (7.29 MB)