Workflow - How to approach large animation

Support Animation and Rigging
#1

Hey! This is my first post and I am a relative blender noobie, but hopefully it’s not a terrible question…

I’m working on a large animation right now (4 minute long panning shot) with a lot of different objects, lattice deformations on bezier tapers etc, that must be synched to audio. I’m finding synching to be nearly impossible due to the large number of objects and deformations. Even switching to bounding boxes for appropriate objects, or the whole scene doesn’t help very much. I’m assuming this is because blender is calculating all of the modifiers etc.

my computer is pretty decently specced (i7) so I think what I want is doable, I’m just missing a few tricks.

As well, I don’t really know what a “professional” workflow would be for such a scene/shot.

I know about animating layer visibility, but there some areas of the shot where there so much in the view that I don’t gain that much from it.

Any help is greatly appreciated!!

edit: just so I don’t look like a total idgit, I should mention i did see the other similar thread, but there weren’t a lot of replies there that specifically related to performance for audio synching.

#2
  1. Make sure, down in the bottom of the timeline, you have it set to “audio synching” (it is set to “No sync” by default)
  2. in the playback menu, make sure audio scrubbing is selected
  3. In the global options tab, there is an option “simplify” – check it an set the subsurf level to 0 (uncheck it when you do final render)
  4. work on objects one or two at a time – move all but a few objects to one layer, get those objects taken care of (synced and everything) , move on to another set of objects
#3

thanks! that approach helps hugely!