Is viewport playback with cloth supposed to be this slow?

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Hi everyone! Thanks for taking some time to help me get some answers.

I created a character with a cape. It has a cloth simulation and the body has a collision physics modifier. It all works as intended and even with no animations (just the cape settling on his shoulders) and baked physics it runs really slow (~3 fps). The cape has 800 vertices (with cloth modifier on top in modifiers stack and a subdivision after the cloth) and the body has 19 000 vertices (with a multires after the collision). I’ve tried making some fixes to get it to run smoother. Baking all physics doesn’t help. I have quality steps for cloth set to 5 and collision quality set to 3. Pretty standard I think.

I just bought a new computer so it just feels like I’m missing something.
Relevant specs (I think):
Intel i9 9990K 3.60GHz 16MB
ASUS GeForce RTX 2080 Ti 11GB ROG STRIX GAMING OC
Corsair 64GB (4x16GB) DDR4 2666MHz CL16
SSD Harddrive

I understand that cloth and smoke etc is heavy but should it really be this bad playback FPS in viewport? Even when all physics baked? Isn’t baking supposed to make it better? I’m quite new to blender so any help or answers are appreciated.

2

You have a multires modifier on it that makes the character a 400.000 verts mesh. Put that a bit down and it runs great.

I think thats not optimized very well on the blender side. I mean no matter where i place the subdiv it slows down the animation. So the thing for now is subdiv and multires should be on a low setting to have a smooth viewport.

For very complex meshe you also make a lower res collision mesh that you parent to the character. That way you can subdiv the character withou that major performance impact.

EDIT: Optimizing your scene helps also in my opinion but i could be wrong.

Cheers

3

Thank you so much for your reply. I will test all of these things out today.

I’m not 100% sure what you mean about optimizing my scene though (more than lowering the subdivisions etc). Could you give me some pointers there, seeing as it’s only the character in the scene.

4

I noticed you have a sculpt backup in the scene. When you dont need it delete it. It will bring down the file size and the time it needs to save. In my opinion it also helps to keep the file fluent… When you want to keep it save a copy of the file before.

When you dont want to manually set the multires or subdiv modifier to 0 and especially with a lot of objects, turn on simplify in the scene settings. There you can set the max subdivs for the whole scene.

5

Did some changes and it’s running damn smooth now. Seems like the multires was the biggest thief in the process. Thank you for helping out!

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