Numerous characters in scenes?

Support Animation and Rigging
1

I am curious to see if anyone attempted to create large scenes involving large numbers of characters. I created a bar room scene with three characters, and I noticed that Blender bogged down. I removed doubles and reduced sub surf resolution from 2 to 1, and it improved handling considerably. I have 384 mb of RAM and using a 1 ghz CPU. I was curious to see the maximum number of characters that other Blender users have introduced into large crowd scenes before they noticed a substantial reduction in performance.

2

Well, the most characters I’ve ever done is two… unless you count the carrot as a character, which I don’t really because it had no armature. (http://www.weirdhat.com/blender/may-2002.mpg)

I would think it would be a good idea to set subsurfs lower or off while animating scenes with many characters. Hooray for the double subsurf setting in 2.25!

3

I saw that animation when you released it for the 10 second club. It is quite funny.

4

2 tips:

  1. Use layers to hide the other character’s when
    you aren’t animating them.

  2. Use as few IK constraints as possible (they
    really slow things down).

Chris

5

Those are good tips, thanks.

6

More Tips,

  1. Hide all the bones you don’t need to Key
  2. Publisher has different subsurface settings for viewing and rendering.
    Set your subsurfacing to 0 for viewing
  3. Turn off Draw Names
  4. Sometimes the interface can actually be faster in solid view mode than wireframe view
  5. Set as many items as you can to “Bounds” view mode. I usually do this for High poly props in the scene.

Basically, you want to give your graphics card the least amount of stuff to draw as possible.

7

Thanks again. You guys are a great help.

8

CAn anyone say how purformance compares to other 3D apps such as Maya and 3Dmax?

Rob.

9

I’ve been testing response times between Blender and Houdini, and noticed something rather odd. Redraw times for captured meshes are pretty comparable when moving an IK constrained goal. However, once a mesh has been “parented” to an armature in Blender (i.e. captured), the redraw speed of the 3d view slows down considerably. As far as I can tell, Blender is cooking the capture for each movement of the camera around the world, which seems a pretty odd thing to do. Houdini only cooks when the goal is moved, which is entirely seperate from the 3d viewport refresh. The slowdown in Blender happens regardless of shaded or wireframe mode. I’m on a dual 1ghz PIII with 2gigs RAM Win2k, fireGL4 card. Anybody else see this?