Moho Forum

Is there a way to globally disable dynamics and re-enable them before rendering? I have a setup that's a bit too heavy on dynamics that it bogs down the scene for manual animation. I'd like to switch this feature off so I can animate the characters, and then switch dynamics back on when I'm ready to render the scenes.

Thanks in advance for any helpful info.

G.

In at least 10.1, Animation menu>Enable Bone Dynamics.

Thank you! That was exactly what I needed to know.

Hi,

Re: Disabling Dynamics by unselecting Enable Bone Dynamics--is this feature working? When I unselect Enable Bone Dynamics, my scenes seem to still be calculating the dynamics--at least partially--because it continues to bog down my scenes when trying to animate 'without dynamics'.

When I remove Bone Dynamics completely from the bones, the scene becomes fast again (as expected.) This is the performance I was expecting when disabling Enable Bone Dynamics, but even if I was only getting half this performance by disabling Enable Bone Dynamics, it would be preferable to the performance I'm getting after using this switch.

Interestingly, if I hide the layers that contain Bone Dynamics, the scene will speed up again, as if Bone Dynamics had been removed from the scene. Of course this doesn't really help me if the element I'm animating is in these layers. Anyway, the overall performance I'm seeing with the layers hidden it what I expected from disabling Enable Bone Dynamics.

I suspect that the Enable Bone Dynamics switch isn't really working as intended. If this is a bug, what's the best way to report this to the developers?

Note: You may need to add dynamics to a lot of bones to see what I mean. My scenes have two characters and they have Dynamics on about 16 bones each. That's probably a lot but I was surprised that this has such a strong impact on performance, even on my workstation. In any case, unselecting Enable Bone Dynamics doesn't appear to have any affect for speeding up the interactivity of these scenes.

Thanks in advance for any helpful info. In the meantime, I'll play around with this some more and see if I can figure out what's going on.

G.

I did some testing using simpler rigs and artwork and what I'm finding is that disabling Enable Bone Dynamics does not work reliably. Sometimes it appears to work but the ASP is still running some heavy calculations in the background (presumably the bone dynamics.) But it might also ignore the command altogether and still display the dynamics animation anyway. Either way, it's apparently calculating dynamics whether this option is on or off.

I should mention we're using 10.1 (x64), Windows 7 Pro. I'm not sure this problem existed in prior versions of 10. Unfortunately, I don't have to time to rollback our installation to find out. Next, I will try it in 10.1 (x32) and see if that makes any difference.

I hope this problem can be addressed soon (10.1.1?). We can work around this issue in the scenes we're finishing now but this issue puts a damper on using Bone Dynamics for other scenes in our production.

If any of the developers see this post, thanks for taking notice and listening.

G.

Some more info for the devs:

I just tried the x32 version--same issue exists there.

Where the problem is most noticeable is when the rigged artwork is an imported layered .PSD. It's much less apparent with vector graphics of course but the issue is still present.

I can reproduce the problem on different computers. Earlier I was using a modest dual core laptop with 4GB RAM, ATI graphics, and Win 7 Pro, but at the moment I'm running ASP 10.1 on a reasonably powerful i7 quad core workstation with 9GB RAM, nvidia GTX 460, and Win 7 Pro. My partner is experiencing the same issue on her workstation, which is similarly configured (slightly faster processor but slightly lesser graphics card.)

Thanks.

G.

If you have an example file, that would help a lot. (Even if you have to remove art or unnecessary rigging, or want to PM me a link [NDA agreement in beta would protect it from being shared publicly]) Otherwise, I will see if I can work one up for testing and reporting when I have the time.

I'll see what I can do.

I discovered another interesting thing: if I disable GPU acceleration for the Display Quality on the workstation with the GTX 460, performance is slightly improved for dynamics. However, disabling Enable Bone Dynamics in this mode still doesn't work correctly--as before, it's always processing and it's usually displaying the bone dynamics animation whether on or off.

At this point, we're pretty much stripping out Bone Dynamics except for one shot. It's just too much trouble to completely remove Bone Dynamics, animate, and then reapply it again, especially if we decide we need to tweak or change the animation. In this instance, it's actually easier to just keyframe animate our 'dynamics' manually.

G.

Discovered something new that's very interesting:

I exported our scene file to ASP 9.5 format and opened it in that version. The performance difference is night and day! In 9.5, the same rig is so interactive that, even if it had the option to disable Enable Bone Dynamics, it wouldn't be necessary to use it. Seriously, in 9.5 the rig animates about as smoothly as I would have expected, where in 10.1 it's pretty much non-functional for animation unless I remove Bone Dynamics completely from the rig.

IMO, not only is the Enable Bone Dynamics switch broken in 10.1 but also Bone Dynamics in 10.1 is in need of major optimization compared to what we had back in 9.5.

This latest test was on my studio workstation with the GTX 460. I'll try it on the laptop with the ATI graphics next but I suspect I'll see a similar result there.

G.

Okay, we just did a render comparison test. My concern was that we might be losing something by rendering in 9.5, but luckily the renders look identical in this case. That's a relief.

So at least for now, we have a workaround solution to this problem. For drawing, rigging, scene setups and animation without Bone Dynamics (or maybe minimal Bone Dynamics,) we'll keep it all in ASP 10. But if we have scenes with moderate to heavy Bone Dynamics, we'll export our scenes to 9.5 and proceed to animate and render the scenes there.

I'm still astonished by how fully interactive these Bone Dynamics scenes are in 9.5, but these same will bring our workstations to a complete stall in 10.1. I'll check memory management next--I'm beginning to suspect that 10.1 is not managing RAM as efficiently as 9.5.

I hope this info helps other artists running into the same problem.

G.

Ugh! I just noticed that the 9.5/10.1 renderings are not exactly the same. There is a noticeable fringe around the switch layer elements. Looks like an issue with how 9.5 interprets the alpha channel or Photoshop transparency. (10.1 rendered this same artwork perfectly.)

Hopefully, I can work around this correctly in 9.5 by preparing the art a little differently in Photoshop or perhaps changing the bitmaps scaling setting in 9.5. More on that later after further investigation. Gotta put the offspring to bed now.

G.

Uh, 10.1.1 has already been released (check announcements section).

Bone dynamics can also be keyframed, so maybe disabling them on frame one while animating would help? They shouldn't be calculated then.

Ah, so it is...that's what I'm running actually.

10.1.2 then?

Thanks for the workaround tip. Did a quick test and found that, unlike disabling Enable Bone Dynamics, setting a keyframe to disable dynamics from the Bone Constraints panel actually works!

In this particular case, it could become a small hassle because we need to select all the bones in the rig that have dynamics to keyframe them, and there are sixteen bones with Bone Dynamics for each character and another sixteen or so without dynamics. There are two such characters in this scene we wish to keep Bone Dynamics on, but originally we had planned for up to six characters with identical Bone Dynamics setups in other scenes. As you may imagine, it could get pretty complicated. Maybe DKRoot's script for Bone Group's would help simplify this matter? I haven't used the Bone Group feature yet, but I imagine setting up Bone Groups for just the bones with Dynamics would making switching them off and on much easier.

Anyway, I don't want to make too big a deal of this. While it would be nice to keep the bone dynamics in all scenes with these characters, we decided it's really not absolutely necessary beyond their first scene.

But it's good to know there's another good workaround for staying within 10 for Bone Dynamics. Besides, we have other characters in the production that have simpler dynamics setups and I can see how this workaround could keep us form jumping back to 9.5 so much.

We'll give it a try when we get to those scenes and I'll let you know how it goes.

G.

Okay, I figured out the 'outline' issue in 9.5. If I enable Nearest Neighbor Sampling for every switch layer, the edge outlines goes away. I haven't checked but I'm guessing 10 had this on by default or it just handles edge sampling better. (I'm guessing it's the latter.)

With this solved, it makes the most sense for us to continue animating this stuff in 9.5 since Bone Dynamics is clearly running more efficiently there than it does in 10.1.1. (For now anyway.)

I think we'll try to keep everything else in 10 as much as possible though--I've gotten so used to the new tools in 10 that it's a little hard to go back to 9.5 when I don't have to.

G.