Hey there!
Quite new to Blender and using it to create a crowd population for a wide shot. Worked fine early on but has now really slowed down when importing crowds or moving around in the scene. Would appreciate some feedback on best settings to use in preferences - have AMD Radeon PRO @6800X (32GB) and Intel Xeon W-3235 CUP @ 3.30Ghz as options under Metal and lowered Undo Steps and Undo Memory Limit. Are there caches or anything to delete that might free up things to perform faster?
MacPro specs: 605GB available of 2TB, 96GB RAM with a 2933 MHz DDR4 R-DIMM memory module.
Appreciate any advice for faster performance or clean up.
thanks
K
Using Population - Human Crowd Simulation by Bproduction for the crowd
I can’t see the scene, so I don’t know which elements are problematic.
However, large amounts of objects and textures may have problems with viewport performance.
I don’t know if Simplify settings can help.
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/cycles/render_settings/simplify.html
thanks - will see if this helps. Unfortunately I’m working under an NDA so I can’t really show things, but it’s a crowd forming a circle so I have the crowd on a flat torus to get them in a circle. Have a plane acting as a shadow catcher and a short camera move in a 103fr scene.
It’s just that when I first started with Blender it ran smoothly as I tried different ways of getting a crowd I wanted. Now it is teadiously slow to modify settings and move around. Renders aren’t bad for speed - but working has slowed quite a bit.
In fact, if you’re a crowd scene with a lot of characters, it can be physically challenging to increase memory usage and processing speed. (As mentioned above, Simplify can help.)
What can be solved in other ways, a few characters can be replicated using geometry nodes to create crowd scenes.
In this case, a large number of characters are in the scene, but in reality, a few kinds of characters are duplicated.
In this case, it will be possible to process much faster.
※ This is one opinion to solve the problem.
There may be some opinions from people familiar with the matter. Please wait for others’ opinions, too 
thanks for these Kim! I was under the assumption that population add on used replicated geometry to keep processing down, but maybe it just duplicates them in their entirity. Will check that.
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