Editor window slowness-why?

#1

Hoping I don’t regret this, but can someone explain to me why Cinema’s editor is so bad in performance? I have a scene with about 10 instances of a mesh and it’s nearly unusable. The mesh is from Zbrush and is dense but definitely did not expect this performance halt. I’m not interested in how well Blender handles things or political motivations, I just want to understand why this is and being Cinema has been recoded from the ground up, can we expect this to get better? Soon? I set the display to boxes and there was no difference in performance. That’s bizarre. Fixing this, in my mind, is the single most important issue that needs to be addressed.

#2

If you can show us what the scene is doing then we can probably help. Simply polygon meshes aren’t slow, typically there is some deformation happening to the master mesh which is then causing all the instances to get recalculated.

Animated materials? displace deformers?

#3

Not really something I can share but there is a formula and displace deformer on the mesh. No animated textures. Let me see how I can tweak the scene to make it sharable. I tried removing the deformer and formula and didn’t seem to make much of a difference. My machine has an i9 with 64 gb of ram and rtx 1080i cards so it should have enough power to make this fluid. In theory :).

#4

The constant execution plays havoc with the viewport and grinds it to a halt. You notice this when you come from other software like Houdini or Blender the viewport behaves like it’s just a single object.

If I were you I’d make some low poly proxy objects with the poly reduction generator, see how that goes, then swap them for the high poly versions at render time.

#5

The problem is 100% the displace deformer. Every click of the mouse, every frame of animation, every material refresh, every tick of the mouse whilst navigating causes the displaced mesh to refresh. Avoid them at all costs. Maybe consider disabling the displacements until the final render, then turn them back on.

@Infograph

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#6

Hey Troyan. Formula (especially) and the displacer are not multithreaded and slow down the editor a LOT. I usually make an xpresso widget to turn them all off globally while working in the viewport. And turn them on at render time or if running a playblast/animatic.

#7

Thanks guys, I’ll be testing this after I get reorganized at home from Coronapocolypse scare. Getting remote pipeline working bleeeeeh.

But not even playing or scrubbing, just grabbing something to manually move it is extremely painful. Does displace and formulas deformers affect just manually moving an object in the editor window without the scrubber moving?

EDIT: Mash answered this :). Reading comprehension, sorry. Going to test this.

#8

Yes.

When working in heavy scenes like the one you describe, I make sure I set up a rig that turns all editor slowing processes off with one simple toggle button. That will speed up your process quite a bit. I will bake things out that no longer need to be generated as well. Like if I have a ladscape that is effected by deformers, and I know it willl never change I will bake it. Preparation like this just come with the territory when dealing with heavy scenes.

#9

10 instances is not heavy. If you poly reduced your high density meshes you’d find the viewport would be more responsive. Surely the whole point of the viewport is to see your project and objects displaced while setting it up?

#10

Good tip, I’ll add that to the workflow. Is this just a rule for all modifiers or is it just displacer and formula specifically?

#14

No, I said specifically don’t do this! :slight_smile:

Girls, you’re both pretty!

I’m quite sure everyone here also has a copy of Blender. It has it’s purposes, as does Cinema.

#15

In my exeprience formula and displacers (and subd levels) are the heaviest in terms of impacting viewport work.

But really Troyan its trial and error. it becomes apparent what slows down the scene when you are working. If something slows the scene down, optimize it or turn off the things that you dont need in the shot. If you are just keyframing things and repositioning elements no need to have all the bells and whistles until you need to render etc.

#17

I get that, just didn’t realize those 2 were dragging the works down so badly.

#18

Yeah this has been the case for at least a decade. Good luck!

#19

Yeah, I’ve used them both in almost every project but I’ve never seen it this bad. Must be a perfect storm.