Timeline Preview Is Too Sluggish
Uthgard
Posts: 878
As the title says, I'm basically unable to use animations because the timeline just doesn't work. It takes me at least ten seconds for a given frame to load onscreen after I click on it, and that's with just a single G8F wth a toon hair and a few pieces of clothing on top of a plane. Filatoon rendering, which is all but instant on single frames, takes minutes per frame when animating--well, it takes minutes as far as I can tell, seeing as Daz keeps crashing when I try. Is there anything I can do to speed this up? Maybe a way to buffer the animation so I can at least preview things?
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Comments
Could try previewing without rendering ;-)
There are several options including one for boxes if need be.
I mean, I can't see myself fine-tuning a pose or expression with box-rendering, so, unless that does anything to help with previewing the actual animation, it doesn't seem like much of a solution?
Also, just in case I wasn't seeing something blindingly obvious, I just tried it out, and the Solid Bounding Box visualization mode takes precisely as long to load a single frame as Filament does. I don't know if this is about my G8F being too bloated with add-ons? The last time I auto-fitted something, it took minutes.
Watching boxes move around - obviously not helpful for fine tuning poses lol ... but that's only one of the several features available. Basically the idea is to "not" be rendering, just let the figures move in the viewport.
Thank you for trying to help, but as I said, I can't even get a proper previsualization with the boxes. Unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean by "not rendering?"
What I would really like is for some way for Daz to buffer the timeline so it can play smoothly all at once rather than calculate whatever it is that takes it more than ten seconds per frame at the moment.
I do not have D/S installed on this laptop ... there's one option that says texture something, try that one, figure only, no hair, nothing except what might be needed for checking the pose. Starting the animation from the timeline, it should just play through, not stopping to render each image.
Do you have active Smoothing Modifiers? I have a script that can be used to toggle them off (and back on) https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/kbwswqsowuhsb8ymthirv/ToggleSmoothing.zip?rlkey=js7eg2mfjdwlpe4wi570we72o&dl=0
Thank you both for trying to help. For a moment, I was hopeful that it would be an issue with the smoothing modifiers, as I had forgotten how much they can take to calculate, but putting the preview in texture shaded, all smoothing modifiers turned off, and with everything but Sakura 8 hidden, I get precisely the same issue: it takes me a mental count of 18 to switch from one frame to another. Given that in the middle of the operation the mouse cursor turns into the "thinking" animation, I'm inclined to think that something's broken with my Daz installation.
It would explain the constant crashes, as well...
Running out of memory would explain the crashes.
A few editions back, I had noticed something a little wonky with the animated timeline ... didn't have too much in the scene, but for whatever reason [I think I had made a "key" at the beginning which resulted [for whatever reason] putting info to every bone in the scene] ... to review playback was simply impossible. BUT if I asked for a "render to images" [I use Iray these days], even though the animation was not playing nice on the screen -- all the images rendered out just fine. I then piece together images to make whatever little videoclips I want.
Using "spot render" to a "new window" [tool setting tab] enables one to make minor corrections without having to redo the entire production. [be careful not to move the camera though]
I don't have that much experience animating in DS, but I was working on a FilaToon animation clip that's about 1.5 minutes long, 3200 frames. Using a single G9 with hair, outfit, and various props.
When I play it for preview, it plays 1 frame in every 50, taking about 1 to 2 seconds for each of those transitions. Rendering out the animation takes about 1 to 3 seconds or so per frame (1280x720 resolution), close enough to rendering a single frame.
Now, this is with G9. When I tried using FilaToon with G8, in even just a simple single scene, it was impossibly slow for me. There have been some mentions about that. I don't know if it impacts animation too.
As a test, try creating a basic scene with just the base G9 anime figure and a simple animation sequence. Does that work any better? If it does, it may just have to do with using G8. Worth a check?!