Sorry… I went on a posting rampage last week about the IK contraints, (which is now solved )
But now, as I’m animating my character, I run into this issue where I’m getting sporatic frame rates. I stressed tested my machine before with a simple scene with a working health bar on it, and like 15 rigged characters running around on a textured and vertex painted field. I got the max poly count up to 24,000 @ 60fps
However now, I have a single character on a scene of 8000 polygons and zero textures @ 30fps and I’m getting some hurt performance already.
I was wondering if anyone has any similiar experiences. If you have then please break your silence now as I’m gathering information to try to get to the bottom of this mysterious behaviour. plz be detailed and stuff if you want to try and help.
tell me about ur armatures, UV maps, and stuff you think is important
we could ‘debate’ the relevance of that statement… or not,
but the point of my post is that I’m getting sporradic behaviour from blender. And just as was the case with my IK contraints causing GE to crash, there just might be a solution for it that can help more people than myself.
contribute if you can, I’m working on this ‘issue’ until I can get some more light on it
Armatures are ‘heavy’ in blender, meaning that if you are not careful your armature can slow it down considerably. Particularly when using IK.
How different is your new armature in comparison to the test ones? Is it very much more complex? More IK? Anything bordering on self-referencial?
Try turning off individual constraints until you see a speedup. Or post it and we’ll dissect it for you. Once you know where the problem lies it is usually fairly easy to fix it.
I’ve disabled all contraints in this new armature and it’s running a baked animation.
In fact hardly a bone is parented to any other. Since its baked they don’t need to be maybe I’ll unparent them now.
And those 15 test armatures I mentioned - they all had their parenting and contraints active. In other words this scene has less in it than the one that was running at 60fps.
I’m not trying to just bitch about performance on GE. I’ve been playing around in it for months now.Testing demos, testing armatures, testing models, testing animations - getting much better results than I am now. In other words my expectations on the GE performance are based on many trials that I’ve placed it under over time.
Some times I can get 70,000 polys… 60fps
Other times I get 5,000 polys… 30fps
It depends on how you set up your scene, how you have things parented and what type of settings you put your materials and textures, and actors and so on - I’m familiar with all that.
Bit by bit I’ve discovered some techinques to improve performance and I don’t think I’ve found them all just yet. Because I’ve tried this scene before with better results. Then I changed some things and now its slow as heck.
Should a totally uncontrained armature with a baked animation really cause that much degradation in performance?
If so, it’s news to me. Doesn’t mean I quit working my game. Just means it’s kinda gonna become Ogre dependant by neccessity.
EDIT: I don’t know if this is relevent to you guys, but now the same scene I mentioned earlier is running at 60fps. I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced this situation. I’m not sure what causes this to happen. Maybe it’s just me.
well, there are processes running in the background ALL the time, ctrl+alt+delete>“processes tab”
Something might have been kicking in, in your first attempt, maybe an auto update or something, that would slow you down. Also, there are nearly always little blips in your computer. Look at your cpu light. In Windows Task Manager, go to the performance tab and look at the CPU Usage stuff. Run your game, and note the change in CPU Usage. The run the 8K one, and note the difference. That way you can see if it’s hardware, blender, or other programs. I’ll go into further detail about it if need be. Just show me some results. Before and after 33k version, and before and after 8K version.
I’ve goten a game with a vertex count of 25,000 to run at 35 FPS. Yes, I am using a normal windowXP with a 1.2 Ghz prossesser.
As for why games run this fast,I thing it has something to do with the textures and materials?
Okay thanks guys. I’ll look into this. @OTO and Duoas -
Hey sorry guys going back and reading my posts It seems I was a bit confrontational without much cause. You guys were just trying to help me. So I’m saying I apologize just for my tone. It’s just that I felt I knew that stuff already and I had a knee jerk reaction - sorry. I’m such a noob. :yes:
Heh, don’t worry about it. I was just about to post and say “sorry for such a simplistic response”. Had I been paying attention to what forum I was in I would have realized the armature would have been baked.
I’ve noticed that things slow down significantly when my antivirus is running. Most have ways to temporarily restrain it. Eg. ZoneAlarm has “game mode”, which means basically “keep yer fingers outta my pc for now”. That’s about all I can think of…
You’re not running anything like ObjectDock or other greedy utilities, are you?
In fact i guess it is near to impossible to stablish a proportion between bones and frames per second. I saw a lot people surprised by a FPS dropdown when armatures increase in complexity.
Hey Lemmy are you there!? I remember you spent a lot of time working on armatures for your Samurai game…
no, I don’t think so. My antivirus has the smallest footprint of all the top rated antivirus so I’m not concerned about that - it’s NOD32 But I do have a faulty installation of Nero installed as well as a rather large harddrive that I haven’t defragged in months (lol). I’ll try dealing with those two issues and see what happens.
but it looks like it’s only me then - that’s kind of a relief. Means maybe I can do something about it.
In fact i guess it is near to impossible to stablish a proportion between bones and frames per second. I saw a lot people surprised by a FPS dropdown when armatures increase in complexity.
hi, In unreal game engine we have a way to minimize the collision detection called, collision hulls. Basicaly take your world geometry, and surround it with a low poly model… the low poly model is what the player will bump into, we will call it a collision hull… give the collision hull an invisible logic brick… now go to your original models and press F, then W and clear the collision, and also make it into an actor-ghost hope this helps
Good tip p00f I saw how they did that in the God of War making-of video. Of course this should apply to characters, where approproate, as well.
Just wondering what part of the game engine handles armatures? I guess it doesn’t fall under physics or rendering, or maybe it does, I dont know. It would be useful to know.
Im guessing with Ogre being more efficient in the rendering department this would leave more juice for more characters with armartures?
“Im guessing with Ogre being more efficient in the rendering departament this would leave more juice for more characters with armatures?” <<< Blenderage
Hey! Nice question!
I think that right now is very dificult to people (i mean normal people not Social, Z3ro d, Spike, Iconjunky etc… etc…) handle Blender´s armatures and animations inside other engines with more graphics features and performance (such as Ogre). Import Blender’s geometry and textures is not that difficult, but Blender rigs and animations is not a standart.
I guess this is why Erwin is working on Collada integration right now. How he will integrate a graphical interface for that (considering that will BE a graphical interface for dumb persons like me) only To n… (gasp…:spin:) i mean… God, knows.
BTW, this is just an hiphotesis, please someone correct me if iam wrong.
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