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Things you can do, too speed up a heavy scene?

polycounter lvl 2
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Green_Cheek_Conure polycounter lvl 2
I been working on some heavy scenes recently. And its absolutely maddening I'm doing more waiting then animating.

Aside from the simple(and painful for the wallet) solution of upgrading your rig.
What are some stuff you guys do when animating on a heavy scene (A scene with allot of characters, complex set, heavy geo, etc...) To make it work faster!

EDIT:
I'm hoping this thread can be used as a tips and tricks and maybe even superstitious ideas people have on how to make their scenes faster.

It doesn't even have to be only based for Maya, heck doesn't even have to have any real reasoning for why you think it makes it faster! If you do something and you think it lets you work faster, please share it!

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  • Arturow
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    Arturow polycounter
    Hey Green,

    Sometimes the scenes are just cruel to the animators hahah, even the "proxies" can be deadly, what I do is to hide things, just put everything you don't need in a layer and hide it. And if its the character that is getting you the lag, I take off his clothes and just stay with their "skin".

    When I animate a lot of characters I just focus on 1 and then the other. there is no need to look at them the entire time ( but make sure to playblast the entire population to see if it's going the way you planned)

    Or if you are animating for games and using a lot of animation layers, make sure you only see the active layers in the graph editor, that can speed up things too, hope it helps :)
  • tholmes3d
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    tholmes3d polycounter lvl 11
    Not to hijack the thread, but Arturow I'm interested in why you called out games specifically for using animation layers. I've only worked in games so I don't have much perspective about other workflows. Mind elaborating?

    As for useful tips, making sure you use referencing as much as possible makes it easy to unload things from your scene when you aren't using them. If the geo is heavy, then just make your own from a few boxes, etc. When all else fails, try nicely asking your computer to be faster in case it was just being lazy.
  • Arturow
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    Arturow polycounter
    Yes no problem, let's say that I have 30-40 animation layers in my scene ( I can't no longer work rotating some parts of models haha because Maya crash with this amount of layers) and I want to use the graph editor.

    If I select the COG of the character, the list of my graph editor will display the 30 COGs from every animation layer and that can slow things a bit, maybe because Maya is computing all the COGs from every animation I don't know haha.

    Maya default option is All affecting so that's why is showing them all, but you can change by going to the graph editor and in the window where the names are <------ right click > Display > Animation Layers Filter > Active

    Also with this, you can have a better look at the graph editor and cleaner, if your Maya just can't handle more layers. Just work on a new Maya file and export your animations when done to Studio Library. You need to get visible the Base animation layer and the new layer of your animation to get it, if the animation layer is not visible it will not save to Studio Library

    Maybe this isn't a problem in powerful computers but I noticed a better performance and also my coworkers :)
  • tholmes3d
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    tholmes3d polycounter lvl 11
    Who, I've never had that many layers in a scene!  Challenge accepted :)

    Green_Cheek_Conure, are any of these making a difference with your files?
  • Green_Cheek_Conure
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    Green_Cheek_Conure polycounter lvl 2
    Unfortunately these are all things I already tried :( 

    But one thing I'd like to share to speed up Maya specifically. Is deleting unused Panels.

    Like for example i found out that Maya has all these unnecessary panels active even if they aren't under use. Such as Paint effects, UV Editor, Hypershade, and even multiple display windows even when they aren't opened up! And those will take up resources.

    You can delete those unused Panels by going to your "Shelf" and selecting
    Panels>Panel Editor...

    Then just deleting all the unused panels.

    That tends to speed up the scene nicely.


  • AGoodFella
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    AGoodFella polycounter lvl 5
    Have you tried File - Optimise Scene?

  • Green_Cheek_Conure
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    Green_Cheek_Conure polycounter lvl 2
    Have you tried File - Optimise Scene?

    No Never had o.o

    I'm actually curious how that works?
  • AGoodFella
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    AGoodFella polycounter lvl 5
    Have you tried File - Optimise Scene?

    No Never had o.o

    I'm actually curious how that works?
    Just make sure you save beforehand beaause you can't undo it.  It cleans up the scene and deletes unused materials, deformers, constraints, etc. You can specify what to keep/delete in the options box.

    I'm sceptical that it will vastly increase the scene speed but it's worth a shot.

  • Green_Cheek_Conure
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    Green_Cheek_Conure polycounter lvl 2
    Probably not the best idea to use that in a production environment then. Since there might be a chance that it may delete something that'll mess with the pipeline >.<'!!




  • Hito
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    Hito interpolator
    what kind of slow down are you experiencing? Low FPS in viewport? or periodic freezing?

    You can regain some FPS by turning off SSAO; AA in VP2 options. Set viewport to use default lambert instead of full textures. use Legacy viewport if available for your version of Maya. Other potential causes of low FPS are complex IK setups, unoptimized expressions. Those you probably have to talk to your rigger/TA. If you want faster rigs, downgrade the rig... do without splineIK spine and/or fingers, etc.

    Periodic freezing are harder to figure out. I get them quite a lot in 2018 with scenes that use a lot of blendshapes.

    if it's really bad all around, maybe worthwhile to profile your maya scene and see where the bottlenecks are. I believe this tool is available in 2016 and newer.
    https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/maya/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2016/ENU/Maya/files/GUID-B1D67D2A-1283-488D-90EB-B7F16E26A118-htm.html

  • Blond
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    Blond polycounter lvl 9
    Hey champ. You can use GPU acceleration/ Parallel evluaiton in Maya to drastically boost performance in viewport and speed up your overall playback.

    To do so, make sure you have Maya bonus tools add-on installed. If not, you can download it for free on their site. Once it's installed, simple go into the ''Bonus Tool''s panel, and then rigging and then look for toggle GPU accelration/parallel evluaiton.

    It saved my life (and my time). :)
  • Green_Cheek_Conure
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    Green_Cheek_Conure polycounter lvl 2
    @Blond
    Ohhh that sounds really interesting. Gonna try that out when I get home!

    EDIT: Seems my workplace actually does have Bonus Tools installed. So I just turned on GPU Accel, and that definitely helped a good chunk! But I get an error message when I try to turn on parallel evaluation :(
  • Blond
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    Blond polycounter lvl 9
    @Blond
    Ohhh that sounds really interesting. Gonna try that out when I get home!

    EDIT: Seems my workplace actually does have Bonus Tools installed. So I just turned on GPU Accel, and that definitely helped a good chunk! But I get an error message when I try to turn on parallel evaluation :(
    I also get the error message whenever I activate them but it doesn't matter; it ends up working. :)

    Also, be aware that for this to be effective, you need a good GPU. You won't notice much difference on older cards.

    Please tell me how effective it has been for you when you get home. Not enough people know about this and it might be good sharing the trick.
  • brucemoose
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    brucemoose polycounter lvl 3
    Isolate select set's can really help if you can access the geometry.



  • Green_Cheek_Conure
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    Green_Cheek_Conure polycounter lvl 2
    Another thing I found to make a scene ALLOT faster is using "Delete Static Channels"

    Go to Edit>Delete by type>Delete Static Channels

    What it does is delete any rotation/translate/scale/etc keys that you have keyed but are remaining static( i.e has no animation on it).

    Its really sweet for making your graph editor clean, and speeding up your character!
    Be sure to select all your characters controls first before applying it though.
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