UI lag with linked armatures

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Hey all!

As usual, I’ve googled around a bit and not gotten a useful answer, so I’m asking here.

As I’ve gotten to know Blender better, I’ve started adopting the recommended workflow for rigged characters, of having the master copy of a character in its own blend file, and using linking and a proxy to manipulate one or multiple characters in the actual scene I’m working on.

The thing is, in terms of UI responsiveness, manipulating the proxy rig is extremely slow and laggy if the actual linked meshes are visible. Even when not using any more complex modifiers like mesh deform, or even subdivision. To the point where they can be very hard to work on.

As an experiment, I’ve tried making the linked character meshes all local, and that immediately makes everything smooth and responsive again

I’d share an example, but the whole reason why I’m using linking is that my character files are pretty large. I can contrive an example and upload it if needed, but this does seem to be a property of everything I ever link.

Is there some common pitfall that I might be doing to cause this? Is this just place in Blender that needs work? Is there anything I can do to motigate it?

Thanks for listening!

2

Doubt if it’s anything your doing. After turning on simplify and the subdivisions to none and still getting some slow responses, I reverted to just using proxie meshes with almost nothing on them. If you have physics on any, just turning them off in the original file helped me.

3

I’ll try using a proxy mesh. For some reason I hadn’t thought of doing that.

I take it it’s just the case that blender is slow at this sort of thing? I would be curious to know why it’s the case that it’s so much slower to manipulate data loaded from another file then to manipulate the same data loaded from the current file.