Performance with high poly count and large numbers of objects
I feel like this is fully described in the title, but I will elaborate. While everyone is focused on shiny new features, we have to be honest here and address a major issue with Blender. High poly count and/or high object count scenes bring Blender to its knees. Performance on scenes with a lot of detail slows down our favorite 3d program to the point that it is really difficult to work with. Undos take ages. Edit mode selections and transforms happen so slowly that you might be inclined to take in a movie, enjoy a cup of coffee, or start researching the finer points of world domination while you wait for the view to update..
A major focus of the next version of Blender (meaning 2.81) needs to be performance of complex scenes. While viewport performance of Blender is now world class with the release of 2.8, Blender has the slowest interactivity with highly detailed scenes except possibly C4D (which I haven't used in 10 years other than installing an older version it long enough to convert some files a year ago, so I could very easily be wrong).
This needs to be a major focus if Blender is to be taken seriously in any 3d related industry. I deal with fairly complex scenes doing archviz and engineering visualization and slow performance there causes major struggles. I can't imagine what film and game studios have to deal with.
- Scenes with many objects have issues with undos taking a long time. Object level selections can be slow.
- A single object with many polygons has another set of issues. Edit mode sections can be slow while undo at this level can also be slow. In general, any operation at the edit level is slow with high poly objects. Sculpt is relatively fast with highly detailed objects (faster than Mudbox for example) but edit mode can approach the point of being unusable with the lag involved.
I really think the core features of Blender are really strong but now can we please have a dev with deep knowledge of Blender find and eliminate the bottlenecks associated with big blender files?
18 Comments
yeah, general performance for dense scenes is pretty lacking. Additionally, I wish that importing assets was faster. I feel like python is a huge bottleneck in this regard (the OBJ importer takes 20-30x longer in blender than it does in virtually any other dcc app)
I'm so happy with the direction of 2.8 that I almost hate to sound like I'm complaining, but we really have to be honest here.
Yes Yes Yes! Today its nothing to have a million polygons, for me its almost the base line count. At the moment I have a star-ship in build, it alone is 1.5M polygons. That's before the greebles and other kit-bashing with HardOps and KitOPs. Oh yea, the shuttles, people, furniture. etc, etc. If I can get away with 5M polygons I will be happy. Thank God for collections and the improvements in 2.8!
I am actually really careful and frugal with mesh counts but for movies, animation and high quality stills you just cant avoid them. Bump maps are great for some things but in the end there is nothing like geometry!
i agree with it, but it should be main call of our community to developers...
Hey! I see this topic started long time ago! We are now at 3.1 of blender and issue with performance still exists. Dont get me wrong - love the soft, use it everyday to work - but handling high amount of meshes or polycounts, as well as importing is still a problem ... I love that blender is getting more and more features, ideas and use cases - but performance should be no1 priority and I dont see it happening. Maybe there is another place to voice this more strongly?
This is the place to voice your opinion, I want blender to go for high poly too but not enough poeple yet agree :(
Thank you for pointing this out.
I have been using Maya for years and recently (about 6 months) switched to Blender - and i absolutely love this software.
I dont ever want to use maya again! The only killer for Blender is its ability to handle large scenes, cant say how much I wish this wont be a problem anymore.
Pls yes. I am forced to use 3ds Max because of this in my Game Art degree, if blender could hold up in the game production pipeline I would actually sing
If you have to use blender to make retopology and normal map bake, most probably sculpt object will be made in zbrush and has millions of polygons. And some times you cant ask the artist for decimated version.
@betmen: good point. I had that with a really high Polly model from Max It almost broke blender (2.6x) at the time. I was on an i5 at the time with 8GB Ram, I gave up.
* @betmen * Have the smae issue... wanna render 15Million poly sculpt. for quick presentation. Retopo + UV for quick iterations is overhead. :(
Blender 4.0 - this is still an issue - at least for my antiquated equipment.
If there was some work-around - like an 'ultra-lite' mode which allowed you to manipulate the model enough to section it off to a point where it was workable - that would be pretty grand.
As it is, even doing that with a model with 6 million+ vertices is an hours long process.
I do architectural renderings. And I really miss the performance of Blender in heavy scenes and this on Ryzen 5950X, RTX 3090, 96gb RAM + all this on M2 SSD...I really love this software and I miss the performance. To be more precise, I'm happy with the performance of the viewport, 100K polygons Blender digests easily without even slowing down. But there are two problems, a small one and a big one.
Really hope for the developers )
First off, love Blender and have been using it for nearly a decade. Having said that, I've found an additional challenge to be Blender struggling with physically large objects, even at lower (<500k) polycounts. Trying to clean up these assets is prone to crashing, and I figure its because of the challenges with precision of some of the more distant vertices.
Not sure if some of these issues are because of the polycount or size, but regardless it would be nice to have sorted out.
bruh sculpting with 10mil verts is terrible , zbru can sculpt with 100mil mesh on the same machine with out lag , i love blender but idk why it has been like this for over years
4 years and change latter: it's still like pulling a bowling ball through my ear. Just for fun I started on the dumbest simplest little scene ever. a flat image for sand. on a 50x50 plan with a path over it and lumps and what not so it looked more interesting than a picture with objects on top
Not even 9,000 things in: grass, some rocks, flowers and trees and blender would start to have a complete tantrum.
I bet if any of the big 3 did that, someone was getting fired, and then maxon or autodesk blackballed for sucking a whales dicks. That's on top of how blender will eat up a whole fucking hard drive with cached stuff. A world full of addons that cost bokabucks. And a decent number of QoL UI/UX things missing, most apps have had since windows 98. When you need to wordpress your app and have 10billion addons that do shit the core fucking app should do. You as a developing house failed. Where are the opitimizations and memory management? where's the guy running this thing on old hardware to tell your code still don't work on it, and here's where things wentsideways? Why does the program still suck a fat dick at importing obj and FBX files. you know the satan spawn of formats model exchange sights, and about god knows how many addons uses?
I second this request. Working now with a converted scene from SketchUp with several millions of non instanced objects. Trying to select a house, with several tens of thousands of objects and throw them into a collection using "m" is a half hour project. Also, selecting the geometry in the viewport simply won't be done. I have to use the outliner. This needs to be looked at quite urgently if Blender is to compete on the same (or better) level as other software.
Best regards to the dev. team and thanks for your fantastic effort. /Jonas (Bronze member since early 2019)
+1, Totally agree... Would like to use Blender instead of a Keyshot to render Zbrush Sculpts. 15million poly killed Blender :( Marmoset toolbag handles it like a charm...
IT would so awesome if I could use blender....
Config: 64Gb DDR4, Threadripper 2950x, rtx 2080.... not enough for blender :(