[Maya 2020] Absurdly slow performance and broken parent constraints
polycounter lvl 6
Greetings!
I've been having issues with Maya performing horribly for a couple of years now, but it's now becoming essentially unusable.
I used to be able to view animated characters with evaluation set to DG with no performance issues. The reason why I used that was because Parallel had a tendency to leave the skin behind if I scrubbed the timeline too much.
Now, I can barely break 3 fps with two animated game ready characters on screen with no background, and that's on a new computer with a 3090 card and a Ryzen 9 3950X. One of the most irritating things I know is when high end computer programs can't even keep up with high end hardware. Pathetic.
I have recently used parallel evaluation and viewport caching instead, and it appears that the skinning issue has been resolved - but seeing minor updates is still extremely slow, though not as bad as with DG evaluation.
All of that is just the tip of the iceberg, though, because now parent constraints are breaking up, Cinema 4D style (I can't get over how awful those were in R19, the last version of Cinema 4D I've used). No matter how I evaluate the animation, the parent constraints are all over the place. One thing I find strange is that this insane jank didn't start occurring before I added the third parent constraint to the scene, and adding it seems to affect the ones that used to work.
Made a little GIF to share the pain:
As you can see, if I move the controller and CTRL+Z, it appears to snap to the correct location, so to me, it just seems like some kind of lazy evaluation that absolutely ruins the animation.
What could be causing this, and what do I do to fix it? I would imagine the horrible performance has something to do with it, but why would the parent constraints be broken even when cached? Any performance tips in general? Anything related to rigs? I do remember once that a single shoulder joint caused the entire scene slow down immensely - and it fixed itself one day, because that's Maya for you.
I've been having issues with Maya performing horribly for a couple of years now, but it's now becoming essentially unusable.
I used to be able to view animated characters with evaluation set to DG with no performance issues. The reason why I used that was because Parallel had a tendency to leave the skin behind if I scrubbed the timeline too much.
Now, I can barely break 3 fps with two animated game ready characters on screen with no background, and that's on a new computer with a 3090 card and a Ryzen 9 3950X. One of the most irritating things I know is when high end computer programs can't even keep up with high end hardware. Pathetic.
I have recently used parallel evaluation and viewport caching instead, and it appears that the skinning issue has been resolved - but seeing minor updates is still extremely slow, though not as bad as with DG evaluation.
All of that is just the tip of the iceberg, though, because now parent constraints are breaking up, Cinema 4D style (I can't get over how awful those were in R19, the last version of Cinema 4D I've used). No matter how I evaluate the animation, the parent constraints are all over the place. One thing I find strange is that this insane jank didn't start occurring before I added the third parent constraint to the scene, and adding it seems to affect the ones that used to work.
Made a little GIF to share the pain:
As you can see, if I move the controller and CTRL+Z, it appears to snap to the correct location, so to me, it just seems like some kind of lazy evaluation that absolutely ruins the animation.
What could be causing this, and what do I do to fix it? I would imagine the horrible performance has something to do with it, but why would the parent constraints be broken even when cached? Any performance tips in general? Anything related to rigs? I do remember once that a single shoulder joint caused the entire scene slow down immensely - and it fixed itself one day, because that's Maya for you.
Replies
https://ondemand.riggingdojo.com/OptimizingRigsforParallelEvaluation
https://download.autodesk.com/us/company/files/UsingParallelMaya/2022/UsingParallelMaya.html
Dude_Free Rig _Maya | ahmed shalaby: rigging and tools development (wordpress.com)
The parent constraint appears to break the IK arm, even when the parent constraint is not active.
Can't disable that offset controller either. I tried to just delete the whole thing in the referenced rig, but it breaks the rig.
The problem appears to be the constraints messing up Maya's hierarchy of the objects in the scene, effectively swapping parent and child. The solution I found with some help, was to simply bake the first two constraints in the scene, then proceed with the next two constraints.
Also, as far as performance goes, this may just be anecdotal - but I got a significant performance boost by switching my computer off with the power switch. I'm not much of a computer tech guy, but it literally went from 3 fps to about 15 fps after turning off the power switch. Still way below what used to run at 24 fps in DG mode - on an old computer (!) - but it helps.