Workspace rendering performance observations

[Daxel]

So today I was working on a project with only 2 FPS of rendering performance and I took the oportunity to make some tests to know more about what affects performance the most. To clarify, I will talk exclusively about workspace rendering performance, which is not export rendering performance and also not editing performance. So these were my observations:


Group masks are the nº1 thing affecting performance. Liquid shapes masks have much better performance.

In a group mask, the nº1 factor is the masking layer. The masked layer was not relevant, even a new empty vector layer as a masked layer gave me 2 FPS.

Inside the masking layer, the key is the number of shapes and points. Effects, transparency and liquid shapes didn't matter, I was still getting 2 FPS converting every shape to plain white and black. Also the worst is to have many shapes with many points inside one single layer. I achieved the same mask but separated into 3 different masked groups, and performance increased to 6 FPS.

And to be even more precise, the single thing that is relevant here for the masks is the strokes. Without strokes, the performance improved from 2FPS to 12 FPS, almost as good as with no masking (14-15 FPS). Strokes in a mask are so expensive, when I tested it with strokes but without fills instead, the performance was even lower >1 than with both on, probably because all the strokes were visible (even the strokes of shapes that were behind another shapes).

The two best quick ways of getting pretty good workspace rendering without changing the rig are to turn off the new "masked layers" view option, and, if you need to evaluate masked animation (facial expressions for example), turn strokes off. Edit: you can turn strokes off for specific layers in the quick layer settings. Disabling just the strokes of this single masking layer gave me 9fps.

Testing it in Moho 14.1 I got 6 FPS instead of 2. Probably because they seem to have improved workspace fidelity even more in this patch, but strokes in masks seem to be the clear botleneck in performance so I hope they can improve that very specifically, add more quality options (no masked layers was great!), or both.

[Yosemite Sam]

Great post! Very informative. Please keep us updated on anything further you uncover. Thanks!

[Daxel]

Thank you! I will.

[roberto13]

Thanks Daxel for letting us know!
I am new to Moho. Coming from Maya, Harmony and Animate.
Maya is incredible fast but not suited for typical 2d environment, Harmony is good but insanely expensive, Adobe Animate is affordable, but painfully slow in performance.
So i am in Moho now.
How do you rate the playback performance and interaction of Moho in general?
Does your research mean, renouncing masks, many points and heavy strokes can give us full playback speed? Thanks a lot:)

[Daxel]

Thanks Daxel for letting us know!
I am new to Moho. Coming from Maya, Harmony and Animate.
Maya is incredible fast but not suited for typical 2d environment, Harmony is good but insanely expensive, Adobe Animate is affordable, but painfully slow in performance.
So i am in Moho now.
How do you rate the playback performance and interaction of Moho in general?
Does your research mean, renouncing masks, many points and heavy strokes can give us full playback speed? Thanks a lot:)

You're welcome! I started using flash, then harmony, and nowadays my first option is Moho.

The playback performance is not bad considering the high fidelity we can work with now, but I hope it can be improved because this latest version 14.2 seem to be where the devs finished making this new workspace renderer look exactly like the final render, so now maybe they can focus more on optimization. And being the strokes of the masking layers such a clear bottleneck, anything they can optimize there will have a great impact.

The interaction performance is pretty good. If it's not, it's because of corrupted references and you can fix it remaking them. That is in my opinion the worst problem Moho has right now.

Yeah, with simple projects you don't even need to change the display settings, they can sometimes handle full playback speed just fine. With more demanding projects, now that I know that the strokes of masking layers are the number one factor, I usually manage to have full playback speed just disabling masked layers or strokes, specially right now that I'm working with 15FPS animations for a game.

[roberto13]

Thanks a lot Daxel:)