Hello,

I'm creating a rather large scene (approximately 20 characters, preview mode), but my computer can handle it (16 cores, 32gb of ram, 8 gb video card). I'm using about 3-4 gb of memory. However, when I adjust bones/motions (e.g. raise hand), I'm finding that it's rather slow, as if my computer is doing a heavy computation. Other times (rarely), moving the character into various poses has been fast. I'm wondering if there's a trick or tip that could speed up the process of animating the character. In short, I'd like to be able to move a finger for the application not to stutter as if I'm doing something memory-intense.

Any assistance would be appreciated.

I should point out that even with one character in the scene, and no props, I'm experiencing the same slowness. I do have quite a bit of lip synching data, though...

One way is to use Quick Mode while doing your animations as that is less taxing on the system.

Large textures will also have an effect, so you can lower the Max Texture Size temporarily (this is a setting under Preference). 

To see how much video memory is being used, you can use a tool like GPU-Z.I also have 8GB of video memory and have seen instances where it was almost used up.

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iClone viewport has always been capricious, even with empty scenes.

Another way to make things faster and lighter (especially if you have many characters) is to create an alternative version of each of your character (a low def version if you wish but not only) then once you are done with the animation, just drag and drop your "high-end" final rendering quality character on top of your "animation" version. If several of your characters are similar then you can even use the same "low def" character to animate each one of them.

One approach that has been used back in the day is to remove any skinning, split your mesh into portions, and parent those portions to your bones. For instance, the fore arm would be a distinct, cut, piece of geometry that you parent to the fore arm bone. Remove all textures (alternatively vertex color your mesh with your texture if you have the tool to do that). At the end, a very light character, no more skinning computation that you should animate easily and fast (hopefully).

Of course, this works only if you don't change the character bone's hierarchy.

--
guy rabiller | GOETZIWOOD STUDIOS
"N.O.E." (Nations Of Earth) Sci-Fi TV Show, Showrunner.

I've an 8Gig video card too. Disabling the GI feature when animating make uge difference responsiveness for me.

Hey guys, I really appreciate the suggestions. I find that the amount of lipsync data is what's causing the issue. I'm going to examine grabiller's solution and see if I can make that work.