Stupid Question

[Hazard6211]

I experience lag when I drop in a complex model such as Chewie. I run on a 64 amd duel processer. With 1G of ram. Now my question is I run on a low end video card. If I invest In a new vid card will that fix the lag issue. And what card would you suggest?

Not a huge problem now I just got the program 4 days ago.

[steve392]

Ram might be a bit of a problem and make sure you have the latest drivers for your graphics card before you change it ,its worth a try .But you will allways get a bit of a hit when using a complex model,just my thoughts for what there worth

[Rodney]

Are you sure its not just the particle hair that is slowing you down?

You can toggle Particles off (Shift 8) and that partaricular lag will go away.

Of course when you want to work with particle hair you'll need to turn it back on.

[wedgeeguy]

You can also change the realtime display of hair under the "Hair System" properties. I believe it defaults to "Quality -> Shaded" but you can also change that to "Quality -> Wireframe". That should help some. Also you can change the "Realtime" density from 100% to something lower. If you do not see the option to change the realtime properties of hair then you will need to do the following.

 

(* Assuming you are running under Windows)

- Start Animation Master

- Press Control + P to bring up the Options window or from the menu bar "Tools -> Options"

- Select the "Global Tab"

- Make sure "Show Advanced Properties" and "Show Property Triangle" are both checked

 

This should now allow you to see the properties listed above.

Remember that these are for realtime and do not effect the hair with a final render.

 

Hope that helps ....

 

Wedgeeguy

[John Bigboote]

I don't know how complex the 'Chewie' model is...but if hair is off and you are still looking for a more tactile response you can lower the realtime subdivision 'draw' amount with the Page UP (smoother/slower) and Page Down (rougher/faster) keys.

[robcat2075]

Generally, very expensive graphics cards are not a big advantage for A:M as it doesn't delegate large amounts of work to the card. A faster card wont' hurt but a 2x expensive card probably wont' get 2x the frame rate.

 

If you have a hairy creature on screen, turn the hair OFF while you're animating.

[rusty]

Hi,

 

I don't know if this has anything to do with what your seeing (and to have time to write this, I had to skip reading all posts) but if this is the problem I fairly sure that nothing will resolve the problem. That is to say, my older system (which was fairly kick butt) experienced the same wait time as my current system when I purchased it and it was a significant upgrade (the BOXX 3200 was arguably the fastest non-over-clocked, single CPU system you could purchase at that time which was a while back -- it was pre-64 bit and I only have one video card, see signature for details). Anyway response time went through the roof on everything else but, not the patch count problem.

 

I can not find my documentation on the problem but there were forum posts on the issue. At certain patch counts, the wait time for certain operations would go way up. I mean you add one patch and 'Ka-Boom'. I'm guessing but this threshold was somewhere around 24,000 patches, then again around 35,000 patches and again around 55,000 patches. When you exceeded the 55,000 patch count (a guess but it was somewhere around that number) wait times for copy/paste patches, add 5pt patch and several other operations went to around 15 minutes or more!!! Other operations remained completely reasonable. Martin helped us out by telling us that the duplicator plug-in would do the copy/paste patches faster -- yeah, that was sure right! While copy/paste was taking 15+ minutes the duplicator wizard was instantaneous!

 

Its pretty easy to tell if you are seeing this problem (and in truth I have not tested the problem in V14, maybe its fixed). Being an old programmer I always suspected array limits were being reached.

 

Cheers,

Rusty