Slow key dragging/modification?

[Dodgy]

Hiya,

Anyone else noticed that dragging keys is very slow? I drag and it takes a second or 2 for them to move. I'm only animating one character, on an i7 laptop with 8 gig of ram in AS 11.2.1, so I think that should be sufficient...

Thanks,
Mike

[Maestral]

Apparently your machine is capable of capturing screen - I`m very interested to see this issue in a video. Would you mind making it and showing it to us?

[synthsin75]

How long is the animation, and how big is the AS file?

[Greenlaw]

Something must be interfering with ASP on your system. A couple of weeks ago at work, I animated a scene with five characters, lots of high-res bitmaps for character textures, and I didn't notice any slowdown when dragging keyframes in the timeline. Granted, I was using a relatively beefy workstation, but if you're only animating two characters I don't think it should make that big of a difference on your laptop.

Come to think of it, I've animated up to six characters in a scene on my old laptop, and there was never any noticeable slow down except when I used dynamics. Could that be it? That was with version 10 on that computer. I'll see how it is with 11 on my current tablet computer.

[synthsin75]

You also might need to make sure your computer is using its dedicated graphics (with dedicated RAM), instead of integrated (which shares your computer RAM with all other tasks), to run AS. I remember having to do this when I first got my Alienware laptop.

[Dodgy]

Hmm, trying the same scene on my work PC which is about the same spec, there's no problem sliding keys around. Must be some thing in my setup I need to have a look at. It's a new laptop at home, so probably I need to fiddle with something...

[Dodgy]

Thanks for the help so far!

I've set the laptop to only use the Nvidia card. No change.
I do have quite few dynamic bones in the character (42 controlling hair and a tie). Is that a lot? If I disable dynamic bones it doesn't seem to give much of a speed up. I did notice if I put the time at 0, I can slide keys easily. The further along the time line I try to move keys, the slower the movement is, which is what makes me suspect it's something to do with the dynamics, but as I say, disabling them doesn't give me any noticeable speed up.

Anyone have any suggestions?

[Greenlaw]

I remember running into problems with Dynamics a while back in ASP 10. It was much faster in 9.5, and there was also a bug that prevented me from properly disabling Dynamics from the menu. There's a thread about that somewhere around here. Anyway, later, it was explained to me that dynamics were improved for greater accuracy in 10 but it could be slower in certain situations.

In my case, I had maybe a dozen bones with dynamics enabled in a bitmapped character, and several clones of the character in the scene. The same scene did run much faster after I regressed it to 9.5 but unfortunately, I also needed Target bones in the scene. I wound up disabling Dynamics on the timeline instead of using the menu command, and re-enabling them in the timeline before rendering.

This should have been fixed in ASP 11 though. When 11 came out, I seem to recall the 'problem' scene ran faster and I was able to properly disable dynamics from the menu command . I haven't checked this lately with more recent updates though. I'll take a look tonight. (FWIW, I haven't noticed a slowdown at work with other scenes that use dynamics.)

Getting back to the topic, I don't recall if this made sliding keyframes in the timeline slow. In my case, it made everything in the scene slow.

[Greenlaw]

I do have quite few dynamic bones in the character (42 controlling hair and a tie)

Maybe...with the number of duplicate characters, I probably had almost that many bones with dynamics in that scene. Just curious but are the characters bitmaps? High resolution bitmaps combined with dynamics might have something to do with it too. I'll let you know what I learn when play around with this tonight.

[Dodgy]

This is just one character, so maybe having them all in one layer could be the problem.

[synthsin75]

If the file works fine on a PC with roughly the same specs, it has to be the laptop. Are both machines running the same version of Windows? What version is having problems? Whichever it is, you may want to consider disabling fast startup.

[Dodgy]

Okay, if I turn off dynamics for all the bones in the constraints panel, AS speeds up to normal. Disabling the dynamics in the Animation menu doesn't give the speed back, so something is still being calculated.

[Dodgy]

If the file works fine on a PC with roughly the same specs, it has to be the laptop. Are both machines running the same version of Windows? What version is having problems? Whichever it is, you may want to consider disabling fast startup.

I found out that if the timeslider is at 0, the laptop is fast too, so I think it's more to do with the dynamics being calculated up to the current time which is causing the slowdown. The closer the slider is to to 0, the faster the response. Even with Dynamics disabled in the animation menu, this seems to be the case.

[synthsin75]

Do you have allow frame skipping enabled?

[Dodgy]

Toggling that on and off makes no difference as far as I can see.