Most important hardware for editor animation speed?

[otomo]

What is the single most important piece of computer hardware for fast editor animation speeds? For character and motion graphics animation?

what is the single most important piece of hardware which makes a car drive?

[danb]

what is the single most important piece of hardware which makes a car drive?

People. :) haha. So you're saying the processor?

[otomo]

People. :) haha. So you're saying the processor?

no, i am saying that its always a combination of factors.

whats a good engine without the wheels. wheels without engine. good engine + wheels and a lousy driver?

for realtime 3D:

1. graphics adapter (because all the 3D calculation is done by the gpu)

I wonder why you ask such a newbish question since you wrote 2000 posts.

[tcastudios]

I'm not fully educated and I'm sure imashination might have the real figures, also I'm on Mac but in general...

When it comes to Cinema the graphic card will not -add- any speed of a animation.
It still have to be calcultated by the CPU to begin with and most modern cards can take what ever is thrown at them.
So basically you need a as fast CPU as possible. Also several CPU's will in most cases not add playback speed since many things are calculated on a single CPU anyway.

Next thing is the GUI of Cinema.
If you take a halfcomplex animation that plays back at ie about 15 fps and then switch to fullscreen it will most likely play more or less real time (25 fps in my case).

So what you might do is make a layout with a absolute minimum of Managers and Windows.
In my experience the TimeLine is a hog (use J and drag in the viewport instead of it)
A open MaterialManager (especially with a selected material)
And also a ObjectManager with lots of Tags. In R10, using "Vertical Tags" can help.

In the end using FullScreen and V (pop up settings) or being efficient with KeyCommands can speed up things greatly.

Cheers
Lennart

[danb]

Thanks Lennart that makes more sense. I figured it would have to do with the CPU somehow more than the graphics card, because the animation wouldn't start until the CPU calculates the expressions first.

That's a good tip about the fullscreen speedup. Right now i have all of my managers collapsed. I'll switch to the "V" popup mehtod from now on.

[otomo]

i hang my head in shame. seems that i am the newb here. i learn valuable things from this thread. thanks.

[imashination]

The short answer: the cpu

the long answer: it depends what is causing the slow speed. I have scenes that contain 10,000 polys which crawl at 1fps, and I have scenes of 1 million polys which fly along at a decent 20fps. The gfx card can be a bottleneck, but only when poly counts start exceeding a million or so. The most common cause of slow speed is either a physics type effect (soft-ik, dynamics, hair physics) or a high object count.

Every frame c4d draws, it scans through every object and every tag of every object to check if anything has changed. When object counts exceed around 5000 you will notice framerates dropping.

Imported architectural scenes are main contenders for this problem, often importing every hinge, handle, latch, fence post and flower as a seperate item. Its usually one extreme or the other, 20 objects annoyingly connected, or 20,000 objects for each and every component.

I updated the cb list a couple of weeks back with a few months of data sent in (sorry, was distracted ;-)) http://www.3dfluff.com/mash/cinebench/top.php

Notice the top opengl speed is an overclocked core quad with an nvida quadro gfx card, the high editor speed is most certainly not due to the gfx card attached.

[danb]

How about character animations? Seems like i can't have more than 2 character moving in a scene at one time. My computer bogs down severly.

[LucentDreams]

unless your using an app with specialized game engine sort of editor (see Motionbuilder, massive etc) dont' expect to ha ve more than two fully rigged characters moving around in editor, heck, even two is impressive, they must be simpler characters and rigs.

As said CPU is the biggest factor not GPU. I've got a gpu that will fly round three characters when simply moving camera, but they can't animate that fast because of allt he rig calculations and geometry deforming and such. This is why we build proxy rigs. if you know your gong to have more than one character, build simplfied non deforming version of your rig. Theres many ways to do this, use the polygon bones which is super fast, slice up your character into separate objects that you child to your joints so they move via child relationship not deformation.

this is one of the huge advantages of the skin deformer over the old indivual bone deformers of R9 and before. its a lot easier to turn off the deformation of any one character simply by toggling the skin deformer. Skin deformation is always one of the slowest deformations and is where a lot of the math is going.

[danb]

unless your using an app with specialized game engine sort of editor (see Motionbuilder, massive etc) dont' expect to ha ve more than two fully rigged characters moving around in editor, heck, even two is impressive, they must be simpler characters and rigs.

As said CPU is the biggest factor not GPU. I've got a gpu that will fly round three characters when simply moving camera, but they can't animate that fast because of allt he rig calculations and geometry deforming and such. This is why we build proxy rigs. if you know your gong to have more than one character, build simplfied non deforming version of your rig. Theres many ways to do this, use the polygon bones which is super fast, slice up your character into separate objects that you child to your joints so they move via child relationship not deformation.

this is one of the huge advantages of the skin deformer over the old indivual bone deformers of R9 and before. its a lot easier to turn off the deformation of any one character simply by toggling the skin deformer. Skin deformation is always one of the slowest deformations and is where a lot of the math is going.

Well that's kind of reassuring, because i thought i was doing something wrong when i couldn't have more than 2 characters in one scene.

I use proxy rigs to animate the body. Then when i animate the face i hide the body polygons. It works pretty good. Up until now i thought i was doing something wrong seeing that i couldn't have more than 2 characters in a scene. Its good to know that this is normal.

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