The smoothness of real-time production is heavily determined by the hardware performance, polygon number, and layering of texture and visual effects.
Besides the speed of 3D hardware devices, the 3D real-time performance is determined by the following factors in priority
1. Shader (Quick Shader is always quicker, but turns off the real-time viewing of advanced 3d effects)
2. Polygon Number
3. Self-cast Shadow - Blur Quality (the higher blur quality the more resource intensive)
4. Bump on meshes (multiple mesh with bump will increase the performance requirements)
5. Number of Lights (esp. with Cast Shadow)
6. Timeline User Interface
This section illustrates the concepts behind iClone performance and provides performance tuning techniques.
Quick Shader vs. Pixel Shader
Quick Shader supports diffuse map, opacity map and drop shadow, it's a rather simplified pipeline allowing higher frame rates for real-time interaction, and higher frame rate of animation playback.
Pixel Shader supports real-time bump, normal map, vertex shader, self-shadow, glow, reflection, etc.; however, it takes a more complicated rendering pipeline.
For users without a high-end graphics card, the speed performance for producing large scale polygon projects can be improved. Users can disable the Pixel Shader mode for faster scene creation and manipulation of streamline production.
Simply turn on the Pixel Shader option to see the real-time rendered scene in the preview window after you have completed the editing.
Users can easily switch between Quick Shader and Pixel Shader via Preference Panel, or hotkey Ctrl-F1
Individual Effects:
Individual effects can be turned off to improve the speed performance.
Users can use frame rate display (fps) to see the playback performance (hotkey: Ctrl-F)
Observe the overall polygon count
You can check the total polygon number in the project by pressing Face Count button in Project - Modify Panel .
For real-time production, it's better to keep the whole scene with nor more than 50K polygon to ensure the best frame rate and smooth interactivity for editing.
Action Hotkey Rendering Effects Toggle Shader (Quick Shader vs. Pixel Shader) Ctrl-F1 Toggle Diffuse Texture On/Off Ctrl-F2 Toggle Bump On/Off Ctrl-F3 Toggle Reflection On/Off Ctrl-F4 Toggle Glow On/Off Ctrl-F5 Toggle Shadows (None - Drop Shadow - Wall Shadow - Self-cast Shadow) Ctrl-F6 Toggle Specular Highlight On/Off Ctrl-F9 Helper Toggle Frame Rate (FPS) On/Off Ctrl-F Toggle 3D Floor Grid On/Off Ctrl-G Toggle Normal Directions On/Off Ctrl-F8
Note:
The hotkey function can be effective only when the system is focusing on the 3D preview window, simply mouse click on the 3d preview area to set window focus
The hotkey function could be disabled If the hotkeys conflict with other applications.
Timeline Interface
If your computer performance is slow during project playback, the redraw on the Timeline could be part of the reason. Try turning off the Timeline interface if you wish to increase the playback performance. Auto-key editing is still effective even when Timeline interface is turned off.
Memory Size on the 3D Graphics Card
Graphic card's memory size matters with the overall texture size.
If you wish to do real-time high-resolution, multiple texturing project, you need to have the graphics card with large enough memory size to hold all those texture in memory buffer.
Build a Productive Working Environment for Real-time Film Production
A Fast Enough 3D Graphics Accelerator
Dual Monitor for Multi-task Editing
Users might need to turn on 10 tracks of timeline for animation editing; and at the same time edit motion, do further facial animation, or fine-tune textures in image software . To work with multiple tasks, equip your work environment with dual monitors could be a very effective arrangement. It can save the hassle on switching applications, making it able to view the result in real-time instantaneously.
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