Less lag animation.

[Psy Guy]

Hello
I have just joined the forum and i hope to be able to share knowledge with the rest of you that are here anyway.

Im a "beginner level" animator with a general knowledge of 3ds Max and some experiance under my belt. I am working on an animation project (personal project) which is rather large to say the least. Anyway the question is what method is good for making fair grade character models that look nice but doesn't lag the computer when working on it? I have a tendencey make complex character models which slow my comp down to a crawl.

-PSY GUY-

[Soukup]

if you could post your specs of your computer that could help a little.

There is no right way to make a character, and I know of only one way, but something that we did with our character this year is when we were done we optimized it. (this is in the modifier panel) your computer will slow down because of a high polygon count. A lower polygon count make your computer move faster. We found this put the hard way when a scene showed up with about 30 million polygons.

You can check polygons by going into the utilities toolbar (one of the six tab menus on the left) and clicking more. You'll then find polygon counter. This has always been a big help to me.

hope that helps a little.

[Psy Guy]

thx for the "poly watchers" tip.

My comp's stats are

600 Mhz Celeron
192 Meg SD Ram
Voodoo 5 graphics card (64 meg)
15 gig HD
Using Max 4

-Psy Guy-

[Joe Matt]

If you need any help, you can send us a line at Tucker.

[Soukup]

ah ha...that's why its lagging.

If I am correct I think that you are barely making it over that reguirements for max 4. If you have some money upgrade the ram and processor, and the video card as welll, (all though that won't make a real difference in animation) The reason you are getting so much lag is that why your models are pretty normal, your computer can't handle it. If you were to upgrade to 512 ddr, you wouldn't have any problem.

Just for you to compare

one computer had
384 mb sd ram
300 mhz
4 gb hard drive (2 scuzzis)

worked great for early modeling but after about 5000 polygons, we had major lag

My computer had
512 ddr dram
2x dual athlon 2000 mp's (1.7 ghz)
ge force 4 ti4200 video card
40 gb hard drive

I was able to move without lagging through scenes of 2 million polygons, with no problems. Upgrading your computer is your first step, and you'll be very happy with your investment.

[Bmud]

Jeez.. a lot of help telling psy guy his pc is too slow. =P

Try this: Go on and model your people one at a time. If it's your cup of tea, model each one in a seperate *.max file, and then import all of them into a scene.

While working on each model, it helps to hide things so they use up less ram. use the [view] tab on the right side. Try some of the options under [Hide].

Viewport settings can be changed for optimal .. viewing too. Right-click on a viewport's name (ie "Right" or "Perspective") and select wireframe to speed things up. If wireframe is too slow when playing back animation, try "bounding box" which encapsulates all objects in a box while hiding its contents. This mode is very fast, and still suprisingly tangible.

After all the modeling is done or if you would like to see some structure instead of boxes all the time use an OPTIMIZE modifier. This will virtually remove polygons from the model. This will also make draft renders go faster. Once you're ready for a final draft dont remove optimize! righ-click on the modifier and choose 'turn off in render' so you will get all of your original model's polys in the render and NOT in your viewport.

These are all very good tips imo. And now that the prep work is done, I highly reccomend you look over Joan of Arc which has to be the greatest character modeling tutorial ever written.

Good luck!!

If you'd like any more help, consult any one of us participating in G-3D. You can easily find us by looking for JabX's threads. There's a great logo competition going on right now. Submissions gotta be in by friday!

[Salik Syed]

his computer is pretty slow for any character animation, u need at least a pentium 2 or 3 , we have a dual xeon 1.7 w/ 1 gig ram and 128 nvidia quattro and even that get's slow at some tasks !
(only more than 40k poly chars.) but i suggest if u use meshsmooth check rendering and put iterations 2 4 or whaever then for view port put 0, this will speed other than that optimize ur models etc.. if u have the money search for "rational reducer" i don't have the mo ney so ... i just use a faster machine (trust me it's cheaper!)