How to increase RAM and CPU usage for Moho? Slow Moho

[Ty505]

Moho on my system is using less than 200 MB of RAM, and less than 5% of my cpu, how can I assign more RAM and CPU usage ? This would explain my slowdown within Moho, I have one rig (a bit complex), but it shouldn't be getting slow on a PC that can handle some intensive stuff.

[Greenlaw]

Moho is always pretty speedy here on any computer I run it on. Is it slow for you on any Moho scene or only for a particular project file with this rig?

If it's the latter, I would suspect you're seeing the notorious negative keyframe error. To fix this you should install and run Synthsin75's Find And Delete Negative Keyframes script.

If it's slow all the time, I'm not sure what could be going on. Try decreasing the number of threads being used in the Preferences, that should make more memory available, although I think this will only affect render performance and not UI performance. Another thing to try is to disable GPU Acceleration from Display Options. If it's already disabled, try enabling it. This option can affect UI performance but it depends on the type of content you have in your project and how you've rigged it.

Hope this helps.

[Ty505]

Moho is always pretty speedy here on any computer I run it on. Is it slow for you on any Moho scene or only for a particular project file with this rig?

If it's the latter, I would suspect you're seeing the notorious negative keyframe error. To fix this you should install and run Synthsin75's Find And Delete Negative Keyframes script.

If it's slow all the time, I'm not sure what could be going on. Try decreasing the number of threads being used in the Preferences, that should make more memory available, although I think this will only affect render performance and not UI performance. Another thing to try is to disable GPU Acceleration from Display Options. If it's already disabled, try enabling it. This option can affect UI performance but it depends on the type of content you have in your project and how you've rigged it.

Hope this helps.

It's just a rig made up of a bunch of vector layers. I tried bringing the threads down, that seemed to help a bit. Does having too many bones or target bones cause lag by chance? I just wish there was a way to allocate more processing power to Moho, it's barely using what my PC is capable of.

[SimplSam]

What activity are you doing when you consider it to be slow? During Play - what is the fps the top-right corner?

On my system at the moment (2 non-complex docs open) it is:

idle: 190MB, 0% cpu
play: 190MB, 2% cpu (at 24fps, frame-skipping)
export mp4: 560MB, 60% cpu (new thread)
export png: 522MB, 44% cpu (new thread)

I opened a 3rd complex doc and idle mem went up to 720MB, and ...

export mp4: 4,420MB, 15% cpu (new thread)

Performance will naturally vary depending on project complexity, features used (esp: bone dynamics, physics, particles, excessive number of points/shapes/layers), number open docs, if audio/video are in project etc.

[Greenlaw]

Moho's performance has always been very speedy in my work. These days, I tend to work on some beefy machines but for years I created my Moho animations on a fairly modest laptop computer with only 4GB of RAM.

My rigs can get fairly complex, with many bones and hundreds of Smart Bone Actions, but I try to keep everything as efficiently set up as possible.

In my experience, I found that what slows down Moho the most is having way too many points in the vector artwork, or using mesh warps that unnecessarily dense, or using too many bit map images that have higher resolution then needed, so I would look there for problem.

If you use the Freehand tool to create all your vector art, that could be a big part of the problem. I prefer to draw my vector art point-by-point using the Add Points tool or Eugene's new Curvature tool to create the most optimal art for bones deformation. If you insist on using the Freehand tool, try to keep the point count optimized by using appropriate settings, or using the available point optimization tools. Keep in mind that using fewer carefully placed points not only means improved performance but can also mean cleaner and more predictable deformations.

If you use a lot of Mesh warps and they're being deformed by bones, make sure the meshes ae optimized and don't have more detail or polygons than required for getting good deformations. The same guidelines described above apply here.

If you use a lot of bitmap images, don't use images that are higher res than needed for the final quality render. This can not only bog down UI performance, it can affect your render times.

One workaround I like to do is, instead of using super high-res textures, I use tileable texture maps for Image Texture Effects in vector shapes, and apply the same effect to the vector stroke edges with bitmap brushes enabled. This makes the art look like bitmap but has all the advantages of vector art. You can see how this look in my old title animation for Hearts Like Fists. This looks like it's all bitmap art but it's actually all efficiently created vector art with bitmap (Image Texture) fills. (Also, this was completely animated on the aforementioned 4GB laptop.)

If you're doing all of this, something else must be going on. In my experience, the most likely suspect is the unintended negative keyframe mentioned earlier. This error occurs rarely these days but when it happens, it has a severe impact on performance. The easy way to check for this error and fix it is the used the script I linked to.

[Greenlaw]

Another way to speed up performance is to optimize your display options. If you have a lot of high res bitmaps, you can use GPU Acceleration, but I find it's better to simply hide high res background art if you don't really need to see them. You can use Layer Comps to hide any layers you don't need to see for animating the scene, and this can significantly speed up performance. Make sure you set a 'master' layer comp for what you want for your final render pass (if you're going to do a single-pass render from Moho.)

Sometimes I'll used a lower res version of bitmap art in Moho instead of the final high res version. This can speed up UI performance when I'm animating in Moho. Then I'll swap out the art either by switching the files in Windows Explorer, or use Layer Comps to switch to higher res art for final rendering. More likely, though, I'll just composite my Moho character animations against the high res bitmaps in a dedicated compositing program like After Effects, Fusion Studio or Nuke. For me, this is a faster and more efficient way to work.

Hope this helps.

[Ty505]

What activity are you doing when you consider it to be slow? During Play - what is the fps the top-right corner?

On my system at the moment (2 non-complex docs open) it is:

idle: 190MB, 0% cpu
play: 190MB, 2% cpu (at 24fps, frame-skipping)
export mp4: 560MB, 60% cpu (new thread)
export png: 522MB, 44% cpu (new thread)

I opened a 3rd complex doc and idle mem went up to 720MB, and ...

export mp4: 4,420MB, 15% cpu (new thread)

Performance will naturally vary depending on project complexity, features used (esp: bone dynamics, physics, particles, excessive number of points/shapes/layers), number open docs, if audio/video are in project etc.

Whenever I'm moving my smartbones that have artwork attached to them mainly.

But is it simply not possible to allocate more ram or cpu to dedicate to the program, 200 MB seems super low for an animation program - I feel like Moho should have an option to allocate memory.

[Greenlaw]

I may be totally wrong about this but I always assumed modern Windows (i.e., Win 10 and 11) automatically allocated more memory to a program when it needs it. The last time I needed to explicitly allocate more ram to a program was way back in Windows 7.

Anyway, I've never had to explicitly allocate more memory to Moho and I've done a lot of heavy work with it over years.

Ok, now I'm curious...looking into what I just wrote above now because it's possible I completely made that up.

[Greenlaw]

If I understand what I'm reading at various places, Windows 10/11 handles memory allocation for programs for you automatically. When absolutely necessary, you can change the priority level for a specific application in Windows, but this really shouldn't be necessary for Moho.

A good way to check how memory is allocated to Moho is to open Task Manager and then open a demanding Moho project like Chucky's Crustacea, and monitor how much memory gets allocated.

Here's what I see in Task Manager with no project is open (121.7 MB), with one instance of Crustacea (407 MB) and with two instances of Crustacea (525.1 MB). You can see the memory allocation goes up with each file opened. UI performance is quite good right now even with the two files open. (I'm using a Surface Studio Laptop, but I would expect the same on my old desktop.)



Moho doesn't require much RAM, and I'm sure I can keep opening files and Windows will just keep allocating RAM to Moho until I run out. (I often work with multiple Moho projects open at the same time.)

It's possible my test flawed so hopefully someone more knowledgeable about Windows memory management than I am will pop in with better information.

I hope this helps for now anyway.

[Greenlaw]

As mentioned earlier, the only time I see a performance problem in Moho is when there is an unintended negative keyframe in the project or when vector art is not efficiently drawn. For the former, use the Find And Delete Negative Keyframe script, and for the latter, optimize the point count and placement.

I've also seen issues when an imported content is corrupted. In this case, try deleting elements until you see an improvement.

In some situations, enabling or disabling GPU Acceleration can also make a difference. In my experience, keeping it disabled works best most of the time, and enabling it on works best when I have a ton of high-resolution bitmaps in the project that I'm deforming them with bones.

Hope this helps.

[Hoptoad]

During Play - what is the fps the top-right corner?

I don't see anything like fps during play. That sounds useful. How do I activate it? I'm using the Mac version.

[SimplSam]

During Play - what is the fps the top-right corner?

I don't see anything like fps during play. That sounds useful. How do I activate it? I'm using the Mac version.

Sorry. Looks like it is part of the Status bar (far right of). So might be at the Top-right or Bottom-right depending on where your status bar lives - and shows the current Frame num when not playing.

[Hoptoad]

...So might be at the Top-right or Bottom-right depending on where your status bar lives - and shows the current Frame num when not playing.

Huh. I don't see anything like fps anywhere. I'm thinking the status bar is the bar with the play and pause button and other things?

There's a box that shows the current frame of the playhead while playing, but that's all. Maybe I'm misunderstanding completely. I'm thinking, if my scene is complicated and can't play 24 fps, it will instead play, for example, at 10 fps, that way the timing appears accurate, and the fps you mentioned is a number on the screen which indicates the displayed frames per second as a way of letting me know how many frames are being dropped. Is that what you mean?

[SimplSam]

...
Huh. I don't see anything like fps anywhere. I'm thinking the status bar is the bar with the play and pause button and other things?
...

[Hoptoad]

(image not quoted)

Thank you for that helpful illustration.

Evidently I do not have a status bar. How weird. I'm using the latest update of Moho, too.

I checked in the various places where I might've chosen to turn it off (settings, menus), but I didn't see any such option.

I made the "select points" tool active, as shown in your illustration, and I see the "create, delete" and "lasso mode" and so forth, as expected, but not the status bar beneath it.