Three suggestions to dramatically speed up anim player FPS
Anim player is sloooooooow currently because it has to calculate everything in the scene for every frame. So if you have objects with a lot of modifiers, then it crawls along at 1 to 2 fps (even if the objects slowing down aren't visible in the viewport currently)
It would be better if there were options to:
Only calculate selected objects
Only calculate objects visible in the 3d view (ignore hidden layer/eye off/respect local view)
Only calculate objects whose geo/modifier parameters have changed since last playback (otherwise play from file cache if available)
This would make normal playback as fast as scrubbing the timeline with the mouse (where nothing gets recalculated I believe).
3 Comments
Yeah, I thought that hiding objects (or disabling them with the monitor-shaped button) would improve fps. But actually, it doesn't. You have to delete them to get those extra fps. (I back up my file before hand to avoid accidentally deleting an object I actually wanna keep).
Edit: Or you can go to Object Properties (Orange square symbol with dotted lines) > Visibility > Show In Viewports. Turn this OFF. But this is a hassle. I'd like it if pressing H to hide objects excluded objects from animation fps.
Please optimize playback fps if you can, Blender devs! Is there a way to get other cpu cores/threads to "bake" animation playback or something?
I settled on animating on 2s (i.e. 12fps) to get full fps at subsurf level 1. But if I add another character, I'll have to turn off subsurf to get an accurate full fps. (You can't really tell if your animation is finished and polished if it's playing at a choppy lower framerate). But then my characters won't look accurate. They'll be very bulky and blocky. If not, making render viewport animation super duper fast might help, tho faster viewport fps would still be much better.
Feels like there should be an option to 'apply modifiers' for the duration of the animation. Obviously this wouldn't work for everything but it feels like it would for sub division and multi res.
* @graehu * Maybe you could unhide everything, select a mesh, then shift + g and choose type to select all other meshes, and alt + C to convert to mesh. Then undo after playback. Could take a long time to process though, so my preference would be the options in my original post I think.