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[davdud101]

Hi guys (and Steve!)
I didn't quite know where to put this so I just put it here. I'm finally back and able to use Anim8or again - and I will! But my problem is that I've got a *decently* beefy system, but 2010's average consumer standards, at least -

- Quad core AMD Phenom 9650 processor (soon to be.. something better!)
- 7gb RAM (soon 8gb)
- 256MB Nvidia GeFore 9100 graphics

Not INSANE specs, but decently beefy. At one point, this computer *could* run stuff at low-end High settings on a lot of games.


But I get the impression Anim8or doesn't lean much on hardware acceleration, is that the case? Because playing stuff back in Scene mode, for example, tends to go at a framerate around 2 FPS, and if I'm lucky, it DOESN'T freeze up before I can hit the stop button. I'm not usually lucky NO amount of settings-tweaking has made it improve and it's been like this a number of years - I've just been able to get by checking my animations after rendering very low-dimension versions of them.

What can I do to improve these rates? It makes trying to do sequencing and animation a chore, if not - dare I say - a pain!

Thanks!
Dave

[Kyle]

I don't think there's much you can do, anim8or is the bottleneck here not your computer.

[selden]

Another way to put it is that the animation and objects that you're trying to view are too complex to be displayed by Anim8or in real time at a high frame rate. While developing the plot for a project, one should use crude, low-poly object models and low resolution surface texture images, for example, replacing them by high-poly models and surface textures only while working on the final render.

If you've ever watched the "making of" extras on movie discs, they call the initial development "pre-viz". The people and environments shown in them are simplified as much as possible, so that they're almost unrecognizable, but they're easy to calculate and can be shown in realtime. In contrast, the final rendering can take many hours per frame, even though they use rendering farms composed of hundreds of  high-performance computers.

[Steve]

davdud101:[/n]Anim8or uses HW acceleration, but it's not very efficient in how it does it. The OpenGL rendering code needs to be rewritten.

How complex are your scenes? How many faces and vertices are there? You can probably speed thing up a lot by simplifying your models. Also, how fast does it run for a simple scene? These could help me understand what the bottleneck is.

[davdud101]

davdud101:[/n]Anim8or uses HW acceleration, but it's not very efficient in how it does it. The OpenGL rendering code needs to be rewritten.

How complex are your scenes? How many faces and vertices are there? You can probably speed thing up a lot by simplifying your models. Also, how fast does it run for a simple scene? These could help me understand what the bottleneck is.

That's likely true. More basic models generally play back without problems- models containing only lo-poly meshes. Models with lots of subdivide objects are where I usually have the most problems.
I think I will start doing more previsualization, that could certainly help my workflow!

The ability to render ranges of frames at a time is so handy - makes "render farming" a lot easier when 8 instances of Anim8or are rendering only 20 hi-definition frames each, or when rendering different passes of one scene all at once.
Thanks Steve!