Optimize Blender for Mac Pro?

Hey everyone,
Brand new to Blender and so far I am so impressed at how far it has come since when I first checked it out. I seem to be running into a problem with its performance though.

I have a fairly capable new Mac Pro that seems like it should handle Blender with no problem but as I began putting together this model it really started chugging on me in the end. I had to keep turning segments of him off in order to keep a smooth workflow going.

What optimizations would you guys recommend?



Blender’s viewport is going to bog down at 2 million polygons no matter what computer you’re on. 4 levels of subdivision is immense overkill, especially since you only have that level in the viewport and not in your final render. 2 subdivisions are usually plenty if you are exercising good modeling technique, 3 maybe if you need to do some extra fancy displacement or something. Leave the viewport at 0 or 1 except for occasional preview checking.

That screenshot might be deceiving, but from the looks of it you have that meshes’ shading set to flat. Change that to smooth and maybe you’ll find that you need a much lower level of subdivision to get a nice looking mesh.

You can also check “Simplify” under the Scene Settings to globally limit the subdivisions for all your objects.

Awesome tips you guys thank you so much. As you can tell I am pretty new to this and was just following a tutorial on the robot.