Question about Reducing slowdown in Editor

[demon3o5z]

I've got a question about how much the program can handle at once, and how to work around it if necessary.

I've got a scene that uses texture in almost every style. The scene was already slow because it had a video playing in the background, but I could get around that by just turning off that element. Now with all these textures I have to turn off basically everything but the characters if I want a smooth workflow.

Is the use of all these textures the mistake? Because I'd rather keep most of them in.

Is it a technical problem? I recently went about upgrading to a computer with more ram, better GPU, and better processor (Asus g15 Strix advantage edition. I don't normally go for the 'gamery' PCs but for the price it had almost everything I wanted). After installing Anime Studio 11 on the new machine, I didn't really see any improvement. Then I thought "maybe the newest version of Anime Studio/Moho is better optimized", so I downloaded the free version of the newest Moho, but that didn't seem to help.

To sum up, working in my editor with all these textures is slowing things down.
Is that just part of the deal with this program or type of animation?
Is it my machine?
Is it a compatibility issue?
Is it just some dumb box I haven't ticked? (I do have the GPU assistance box ticked)

Any input or suggestions are appreciated. Thanks.

[Greenlaw]

Moho is usually very speedy for me, and I animate some very heavy scenes for work and personal animations. FWIW, at work, I have the benefit of running with a very beefy system but at home I didn't always have this luxury.

In my experience, when I'm seeing a slow down in performance, there are a couple of things I check for.

1. Unintended negative keyframes. This is a random bug that occurred more often in past versions of Moho, but it still apparently occurs in rare cases. What happens is that a random animation key is created thousands of frames before zero, which forces Moho to calculate interpolation across those thousands of frames. The fix is to find these frames and delete them. To make this task easy, use Synthsin75's Delete Negative Keyframes script from here: http://lostmarble.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=32714

2. If there are a lot if large bitmap images, try enabling GPU Acceleration.

3. If GPU Acceleration is enabled and I'm not using a lot for super-high res images, try disabling it.

4. If I'm deforming a lot of high-res image with bones or meshes, see if the resolution of the images can be reduced to improve performance. (Naturally, you'll want to preserve the original high-res images.)

5. If the high-res images are only used for backgrounds, try working with lower res images, and render the character passes only. (Use Layer comps for this.) And the compositing the characters with the BG in a compositing or video editing program. (This is a typical workflow at studios; it's more flexible and efficient to work this way.)

I feel like I wrote a post like this recently with more optimization info. You can probably do a search for that if you need the additional info. Good luck!

[demon3o5z]

Moho is usually very speedy for me, and I animate some very heavy scenes for work and personal animations. FWIW, at work, I have the benefit of running with a very beefy system but at home I didn't always have this luxury.

In my experience, when I'm seeing a slow down in performance, there are a couple of things I check for.

1. Unintended negative keyframes. This is a random bug that occurred more often in past versions of Moho, but it still apparently occurs in rare cases. What happens is that a random animation key is created thousands of frames before zero, which forces Moho to calculate interpolation across those thousands of frames. The fix is to find these frames and delete them. To make this task easy, use Synthsin75's Delete Negative Keyframes script from here: http://lostmarble.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=32714

2. If there are a lot if large bitmap images, try enabling GPU Acceleration.

3. If GPU Acceleration is enabled and I'm not using a lot for super-high res images, try disabling it.

4. If I'm deforming a lot of high-res image with bones or meshes, see if the resolution of the images can be reduced to improve performance. (Naturally, you'll want to preserve the original high-res images.)

5. If the high-res images are only used for backgrounds, try working with lower res images, and render the character passes only. (Use Layer comps for this.) And the compositing the characters with the BG in a compositing or video editing program. (This is a typical workflow at studios; it's more flexible and efficient to work this way.)

I feel like I wrote a post like this recently with more optimization info. You can probably do a search for that if you need the additional info. Good luck!

Thanks for the suggestions! I'll try working through these.

[slowtiger]

First thing to check is display quality of the viewport. Switching off images should switch off textures as well (am I right with this?), at least they should go when you switch off fills.

I worked on a series which had textures for each fill in 2012, and there was no slowdown because of that.

[Greenlaw]

Yes, I absolutely agree with slowtiger's suggestion...if things are getting slow, one of the easiest things you can do is to disable anything you don't need to see to animate with. This can include textures, transparency, backgrounds, other characters, etc. Disabling some of these things won't affect final render quality, and for others, you can use Layer Comps to set up different viewing modes for working with different parts of a scene. (Layer Comps do affect final render, so be sure to setup a 'Master' layer comp before creating new ones.)

Additionally, if you're using physics, but you don't currently need to calculate the physics (like when you're animating a character or the camera,) you can disable Physics until you're ready to render. Or, even better, you can bake the physics to keyframes and then disable physics...this way, you can still animate the the previously solved physics animation. This gives you the same result without wasting CPU power.

To recap: Moho is a reasonably fast program under normal use, and with some optimization, it can be even faster. If it gets gradually slower, it's probably because the complexity of the scene is beginning to challenge your computer, but there are things you can do to compensate without hurting the result. And if the performance drops suddenly, there may actually something wrong with the project, like negative keyframes or an inefficient or corrupt imported item (image, audio, video.)

Hope this helps.

[demon3o5z]

First thing to check is display quality of the viewport. Switching off images should switch off textures as well (am I right with this?), at least they should go when you switch off fills.

I worked on a series which had textures for each fill in 2012, and there was no slowdown because of that.

GAH! This was it! I've been working with anime studio/moho for literally over 10 years now, and I'm still learning about little setting like this. I feel dumb. Thank you so much!

[davoodice2]

I've got a question about how much the program can handle at once, and how to work around it if necessary.

I've got a scene that uses texture in almost every style. The scene was already slow because it had a video playing in the background, but I could get around that by just turning off that element. Now with all these textures I have to turn off basically everything but the characters if I want a smooth workflow.

Is the use of all these textures the mistake? Because I'd rather keep most of them in.

Is it a technical problem? I recently went about upgrading to a computer with more ram, better GPU, and better processor (Asus g15 Strix advantage edition. I don't normally go for the 'gamery' PCs but for the price it had almost everything I wanted). After installing Anime Studio 11 on the new machine, I didn't really see any improvement. Then I thought "maybe the newest version of Anime Studio/Moho is better optimized", so I downloaded the free version of the newest Moho, but that didn't seem to help.

To sum up, working in my editor with all these textures is slowing things down.
Is that just part of the deal with this program or type of animation?
Is it my machine?
Is it a compatibility issue?
Is it just some dumb box I haven't ticked? (I do have the GPU assistance box ticked)

Any input or suggestions are appreciated. Thanks.

moho is not multi thread program so it cant use all of cpu power.
1: to speed up is it: disable hyperthreading in bios settings.(probably speed dramatically increased) (google it for cpu and mainboard model)
2: use lower number of layers specially if they have rigg.
3: split your scene and prevent from to animate long scenes.
4: if you have to use many layers , send character to empty scene work there next bring it back to your scene. even you can render as a png and import it into image sequence layer .
5. if you have multi layer psd , make it flatten and import to moho,when animate is done,bring main file and layout.