Things you can do, too speed up a heavy scene?
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!
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!
Replies
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
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.
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
Green_Cheek_Conure, are any of these making a difference with your files?
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.
I'm actually curious how that works?
I'm sceptical that it will vastly increase the scene speed but it's worth a shot.
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
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).
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
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.
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.