This is a issue I encountered when using a very long curve as a “path” for a mesh to travel along and deform against.
in the beginning the curve was short and the mesh deformed nicely, but when extending the curves anchorpoint to the final result, the rendering and viewport mesh deform was very choppy.
here’s a picture.
I bugreported it but it’s actually not a bug. Campbell pointed out that it had to do with the subdivision generated evenly spaced along the curve, and the used to deform the mesh. you can actually raise the number of that subdivision in the Curves object settings.
There’s a preview res of 12, (by default, raise this and it’s get smoother when using very long curves in Curve Modifier) and a render res of 0, (info says something about disabling this at render time)
another approach is using nurb curve, or path (almost the same) there’s virtually no artifacts in the mesh deform even how long the path is.
here’s a picture of that (w/o changing the res leaving it at 12 I couldn’t force the path to display artifacts)
So there you go, Im doing a typograhpy animation thingy with curves so. I actually split my .blend files into two separate, one with a very long curve and one with short and now I have to stitch them together (renders)
or i revisit the initial blend file and try to fix it with changing resolution instead. easier to maintain objects animation to match.
anyways just some findings, hope it helps someone doing similar things.