Can't even preview the mime animation!!!!

[pit]

Your graphics card might be to weak for the job - in general Macs are a bit weak when it comes to 3D. I don´t wanna start a Mac versus PC thing here!!! (Working on Macs myself and :love: ´em, but will port all my 3d stuff to a PC in the near future.) The G3/G4 processors are not up to the task for the time being. Sad but true!

[Srek]

Hi,
having the timeline open with lots of keys visible will slow down screen redraw. Try closing it
Regards
Srek

[phobos]

O.k it's a very complicated animation but I don't think that only the PC people create all the short movies out there.There must be a way to preview this anim.My problem is that i don't even see a picture when I play the animation.On all the other scenes I can play them either in real time ir in dropped frames. I don't see why this scene differs. If it would play in 2 frames per second that's o.k with me.But I want to see it play!!!!
Does this scene feature some kind of dynamics that takes much of the prossecor time?

[imashination]

Originally posted by phobos
O.k it's a very complicated animation but I don't think that only the PC people create all the short movies out there.There must be a way to preview this anim.My problem is that i don't even see a picture when I play the animation.On all the other scenes I can play them either in real time ir in dropped frames. I don't see why this scene differs. If it would play in 2 frames per second that's o.k with me.But I want to see it play!!!!
Does this scene feature some kind of dynamics that takes much of the prossecor time?

Yes.

To give R8 more time to redraw the screen, go into the Preferences and set the redraw limit to a higher number, such as 2000. This gives it 2 seconds to draw the frame.

[phobos]

O.k imashination followed your advice and upped it at 700 and it worked o.k.
Now to my other question.
Surely my work will be a lot inferior and less complicated than this piece but how complicated do you think can an animated model be before getting preview stuttering?
It was quite a shock to me finding that I couldn't play an animation with a single character!!!
I know my machine is incapable on 3d work but that's not the reason I bought it.
Can anybody provide me with an animated model to see the capabillities of my machine?I just want to see the boundaries wich my machine can work at real time.I would really appreciate it if somebody could do this thing for me.
Thanks in advance

[spider-dude1]

Originally posted by pit
Your graphics card might be to weak for the job - in general Macs are a bit weak when it comes to 3D. I don´t wanna start a Mac versus PC thing here!!! (Working on Macs myself and :love: ´em, but will port all my 3d stuff to a PC in the near future.) The G3/G4 processors are not up to the task for the time being. Sad but true!


Mac is a more powerfull 3D platform than windows.

I yust wanted you to know.

cya

[Vong]

Originally posted by spider-dude1
Mac is a more powerfull 3D platform than windows.

I yust wanted you to know.

cya


Uhm..... Yeah.... Ok. :)

[pit]

@spiderdude: I wrote: I don´t wanna start a Mac versus PC thing here!!!

[CosmicBear]

Originally posted by phobos
My machine is a powerbook (DVI) 667 with 512MB of memory.

well, as it seems, that's not a problem of your machine only...
i got a Dual G4 2x1GHz with 1 GByte of RAM and the mime-animation is still not playing on my machine.

some of my own scenes are much more complex and they play fine.. so it must be something in the mime-scene, i guess...

[spider-dude1]

I'm not a mac user myselve but it's just a fact.

cya

[AdamT]

Originally posted by spider-dude1
I'm not a mac user myselve but it's just a fact.

cya

Er, I think even the most dedicated Mac user will tell you that that's totally ridiculous.

[pit]

@spiderdude: This is really stupid - why don´t you get off the case? Nobody wants or needs another Mac versus PC discussion! For one: it´s just tools you need to get the job done! Second: Every benchmark test will prove you wrong. At the moment PC´s are, amongst others, far superior at 3D related stuff. Ok - so I´ll use a PC for 3D. It´s as easy as that and no big deal. I´ve been working on Macs for 15 years now, so I guess you can call me a dedicated Mac user, and (as predicted by AdamT) I will tell you : Your statement is totally ridiculous.
Hope you will be able to contribute with better and more relevant posts in the future.


@Phobos: Sorry! for having this in your thread - hope it stops now - and that you´re able to solve your problem!!
Cheers
Pit

[phobos]

Cosmic bear I'm sorry that the mime scene doesn't play for you too but at the smae time I'm happy I'm not the only one.... I'm starting to think that this is a problem with the specific file... I don't know. Hope I can get some pretty good work with the equipment I have.We'll see in a few months....

[Per-Anders]

you should be able to do amicably well with what you have. remember that even though softik is nice, and expressions are a great timesaver in most situations... many pro animators tend to either use FK or standard IK and very few or no expressions within a rig for the ultimate in control and recreation of natural movement.

hopefully next time maxon will update they will include a caching system for stuff like soft ik/dynamics (a-la-maya). this would speed up things no end, even for those who have lower end machines.

[CosmicBear]

i agree with you 105%, mdme.

i've been working in animation for three years now besides college and i learned one thing: I WANT TO BE THE ONE IN CONTROLL! not the computer, not the expression, not the program! ME, ME, ME :bounce: :D

even if this means, that there is more work for me, but at least, i know what results i'm getting at every moment of the project :)

[wuensch]

hmm-- I am on a dual Athlon 1800+, a still a very fast machine,at least when both processors are used by the app. although only with a geforce 2 pro card, but i think graphics card speed is not the thing that slows it down..
The mime plays (without tweaking parameters), but it is nowhere near25 fps-- i would guess its something like 8 to 12 fps.
I also noticed that playback in Editor does not profit from dual processors, so a dual mac will hardly be faster than a single processor Mac(or PC) with the same clockspeed here.

So on a Mac that is presumably only a third of the speed of my machine it should be too slow.
I guess its is the intensive use of SoftIK and expression and the calculation that comes with that slows it down-- a preview render of the whole scene took some minutes to complete and shows the full beauty of the animation.
deactivating the hypernurb lets it play back near Realtime, by the way.Dont ask me why though, because editor subdiv is 0.

Oliver

[AdamT]

[i]
deactivating the hypernurb lets it play back near Realtime, by the way.Dont ask me why though, because editor subdiv is 0.

Oliver [/B]

That's weird. You might report that to Maxon.

[wuensch]

--I noticed when looking into the postforum Messiah thread that you try to get rid of M:A.
Did someone buy it?
I actually had the same thoughts when working through Maxons beautifully detailed Mime tutorial Handbook Monday and Tuesday.
C4Ds comparatively simple but effective toolset for characteranimation and the nice softIK will be absolutely enough for doing the job I recently bought Messiah for.
Thought i´d wait some more til they release the "real" Cinema Messiah Connection, but it seems it never comes-- and I had to start modelling my characters this week.
When I am finished modelling I will have to start rigging with C4D and I will hardly switch to a Messiah based pipeline then.

Olli

[AdamT]

Originally posted by Olli Wuensch
--I noticed when looking into the postforum Messiah thread that you try to get rid of M:A.
Did someone buy it?
Olli

Nope, not yet. I'll have to expand the for-sale sign to other forums. I guess there'll probably be more interest on a LW or Max forum. But if anyone's interested, I'll sell it (Messiah:Animate) for $450.

Messiah's very capable, but the lack of Cinema support was disappointing, and the documentation is less than stellar.

So I'm with you. Mocca will more than meet my CA needs.

[wuensch]

I see it exactly the same way-- a very capable app, but a disappointing support of connection to the host app.
olli

[imashination]

Originally posted by AdamT
That's weird. You might report that to Maxon.

I believe the Mime scene has the mime character set with a HN tag, so it forces a specific subdivision onto the mine, thus ignoring the HN setting. You should generally turn off HN when animating characters, this goes for any 3D app.

[captain3d]

I was also dissapointed with my first playback experience with SIK, but it is understandable why as we are basically working with a dynamics system that is calculating changing relationships of the bones in real (ish) time.

No machine is available at this time to do it in true realtime especially if you had a few characters interating.

The only fix would be to have a ram cache/baked playback which maybe slightly faster than rendering out a preview movie. Switching to bounding box wont help much as the SIK calculation is still there unfortunately.

If you were animating the feet of a character it might be worth deactivating the are bones etc but this is quite a compromise.

Setting the SIK anchor strength lower will make the calculation faster but more spongy. It might be ok for blocking.

No way around this one till we get more Ghz...Phil

[Per-Anders]

how do we make c4d put the soft ik solution into ram cache? (or even better thinking particles or any other "realtime" calculation)

[captain3d]

The thing is putting it into a ram cahce will probably take as long as rendering an editor movie. For it ti be a real advantage i twoudl need to hold the ram cache and update only the small changes that get made as you animate.

Phil

[phobos]

One question.If nobody can play the animation correctly how the hell it was built in the first place?????????????
Makes me wonder.
The man who made it must be a cinema god and a god of patience.

[captain3d]

Well it can be played but only slowly on the fastest machine. The animation is by Naam (happyship.com) and I believe he produced it on an 800mhz Athlon

Phil

[Per-Anders]

you mean like after effects? or maya? that would be very useful though

[captain3d]

Exactly, but even in Maya I end up rendering playblast movies to really check that animation so a ram cache is not a final solution.

Phil

[phobos]

I guess that playing it slowly doesn't help to get the feeling you want.Unless you have done a ton of animations and know exactly what's the end result.And the 800MHz athlon machine is far from perfect.Somebody said here that he had a double cpu athlon machine and he got nearly real time animation so I guess the athlon machine could play really awful the animation.anyway.
Congrats to Naam. (I watched his very first anim a while ago and I thought that it was very cool.) Glad to see his abillities in animation evolving

[captain3d]

I have a dual 1800 Athlon and ATI 8500 and it doesnt have a hope of playing SIK characters in realtime.

Phil

[wuensch]

-hmmm--on my dual 1800 I had the impression that when turning OFF the hypernurb the Mime came close to realtime--at least to my eyes-- could be wrong though, at least it was reasonably fast.
I agree that a realtime playback of SIK is nothing to count on on the machines we use today.
So i guess it is render preview a lot.
On the other hand, SIK is really a very advanced animation tool, guess i will not want to live without it.
Olli

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