How to speed up my character rig?

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rrahh
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How to speed up my character rig?

Post by rrahh »

Hey dear Moho Forum,

I’m working on a character that uses a lot of smart bone actions (37) and i also used some mixed smart bones (thanks multi rush!). The character is mostly build with vectors with some layer shading effects, and each element (arms, legs, etc.) has a multiplied bitmap warped by a mesh. I have a complex head turn and a rather simple body turn and so far everything works great, BUT:

The rig reacts very slowly. When I’m animating i have to wait ages until the next bone gets selected.

Do you have any hints or advices on how to speed up my rig?

I’m still working with Moho Pro 12.5. Maybe 13 will do the trick?
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DK
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Re: How to speed up my character rig?

Post by DK »

I feel your pain :) Simplest fix I ALWAYS fall back on is to adjust your display quality options down in the bottom RH corner of the main display area. If you can stand it set this to low, do all your animation then set it back to high or whatever after your animation is rendered.

Cheers
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Daxel
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Re: How to speed up my character rig?

Post by Daxel »

rrahh wrote: Sun Oct 13, 2019 8:57 am ...each element (arms, legs, etc.) has a multiplied bitmap warped by a mesh.
why do you have this?
I'm just curious, I'm still learning. I'm sorry I cannot help you with the performance. I would close any other app and turn down the quality. Maybe, if you are using color bones, I remember Greenlaw said something you could try... yep, this:
BTW, if you choose to use color coded bones the way I do, you'll probably want to completely disable the color bones channels from Timeline Channels. Otherwise, you may wind up with a lot of unnecessary clutter in the Timeline.
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rrahh
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Re: How to speed up my character rig?

Post by rrahh »

I use the multiplied Bitmaps e.g. to give my Characters cloths the look of corduroy trousers or felt jacket etc.
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Greenlaw
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Re: How to speed up my character rig?

Post by Greenlaw »

Moho has generally been a very fast program for me but I've found it can slow down when I have a lot of large bitmap images I'm deforming with bones and meshwarp. Here are some tips for dealing with that.

To helps reduce the CPU and memory usage, I like to use vector layers for the shapes and outlines and use image textures mainly for fills. This is what I've done for some of my DreamWorks stuff, and the HLF animated titles I made years ago was entirely done that way.

When I have to work with a lot of image layer directly, I make sure I'm not using textures that are unnecessarily higher res than they need to be.

It also helps to break out the backgrounds and not render them at the same time as the characters. I like to set the background layers to Do Not Render, and then, for visual reference only, I may use a much lower res version of the background than what I intend to use for the final output.

When rendering, I output only the character passes as image sequences from Moho, and then composite that against the high res background in After Effects or Fusion. This is a much faster workflow for me. If you're not using a third party compositing program, you can do the same with Moho. Use Layer Comps to output just the characters and any animated props. Then setup an 'environment' project that contains your high res background layers and import the pre-rendered characters and place them there. Render your final comp from this project.

Once you have these set up, when you need to make any changes, you can use Moho Exporter to update both by batching rendering the projects.

Some additional tips:

Try working with and without GPU acceleration. Depending on your hardware and the type or assets your working with, you might find Moho is more responsive when this is on or off.

Finally, any extreme slowness may have nothing to do with the above. It's possible that you have an unwanted keyframe thousands of frames before frame zero. This can impact Moho's performance severely as is attempts to interpolate thousands of extra frames unnecessarily. To fix this, you'll want to run Wes' 'Find and Delete Negative Keyframes' script. This tool can alert you if the problem exists and then remove the keyframes for you. Make sure you're using this on a copy of your project just in case it causes unexpected results.

Hope this helps.
Last edited by Greenlaw on Tue Oct 15, 2019 2:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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rrahh
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Re: How to speed up my character rig?

Post by rrahh »

Thank you!
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