I only have a 1080 TI with 11 gigs of memory, and upgrading in 2020 had been on my to do plan, but no income put a stop to that thinking.

I am working on a large scene and IClone performance is so slow it affects how much work I can get done.

I thought maybe it was the fact my poker table has a chip rack with hundreds of chip props, but even if I hide the poker table and do something as simple as rename a prop in Scene Manager, and IClone takes 15 seconds to recover.

I realize my project has 539,000 triangles, but Reallusion needs to take lessons from Microsoft Flight Simulator. They can draw entire cities on the fly and my poker room with 1 table and no cards or chairs, and I spend 55 minutes out of an hour waiting and 5 minutes working.

A 3080TI and super fast pc would help some, but I think some rethinking on when IClone needs to redraw is needed. The view port updates fast when I move around the scene, but then 15 seconds go by before I can touch it again.

It seems to be worse in the latest updates, but maybe I just use IClone more and notice it.

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Sorry, folks, if I'm late to the dance.

I think the OP as well as Mr. G and others who complain/worry about performance in iClone are definitely right, but I also don't think it's anything new. I have always had a top (or near top) machine to work with iClone and yet I can remember struggling even two or three years ago to get more than a character or two in a scene.  As a matter of fact, it's when iClone is the most vulnerable -- I've gotten sets themselves with millions of polys and textures that are no problem whatsoever inside of iClone, but the minute you get to three or more avatars you can bring even my 12GB Titan GPU to its knees.

I've taken to using dummy avatars as placeholders for scenes where there are more than two characters, delaying until the very end (after all animation has been laid down) putting the real ones in, and this has been workable to me (although it often results in scenes that then can't be saved/reloaded -- if anyone here has seen my "Cowboys" video, where I have around 8 avatars in the scene at any one time, the minute I would do all replacements I needed to render because the *slightest* thing -- even moving a low-poly rock -- would crash the system).  I had hoped there would be ways to export lo-poly standins (that was one of the features touted by iClone) but even these aren't very workable (so there must be something about the avatar itself that just has too much baggage with it).

I'm guessing most of the RL devs use, for testing at least, only one or two avatars.  Perhaps if they worked routinely with four or five in a scene they would understand the issues.  I can't even send them one of my scenes for testing because it won't save (it just crashes).  

For others -- if you want to work with iClone for now I would highly recommend sticking to two avatars at the most in any scene OR use the dummy ones for standins until the very last moment.  This is as close to a workaround as I have come up with, although if others have one I'd love to hear about it (the real workaround that RL could implement would be multi-res avatars -- you load in the lo-poly/lo-res one to work with but it will then auto-substitute the higher res one at render time.  This is, indeed, what software like Max does, it allows you to have stand-in objects that are placeholders but otherwise work and look pretty much like your higher res ones that swap in for renders -- I'm too sleepy right now to remember the term but you get the idea).

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Alienware Aurora R16, Win 11, i9-149000KF, 3.20GHz CPU, 64GB RAM, RTX 4090 (24GB), Samsung 870 Pro 8TB, Gen3 MVNe M-2 SSD, 4TBx2, 39" Alienware Widescreen Monitor
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley

That would be great, Peter.

In 3D Max there is a replace modifier that allows replacement of the object at render time.  Even a VERY low res avatar that could replace with a much higher one would make working in iClone a ton better (so just have it linked in the modify tab to this higher model).

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Alienware Aurora R16, Win 11, i9-149000KF, 3.20GHz CPU, 64GB RAM, RTX 4090 (24GB), Samsung 870 Pro 8TB, Gen3 MVNe M-2 SSD, 4TBx2, 39" Alienware Widescreen Monitor
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley

Thank you Peter!! Your attention to this is sincerely appreciated,  RL products are really great and innovative,  and while I can't speak for everyone,  I know I'd be happy to pay for an upgrade that focuses  on stability and efficiency,  we are aware that the time to fix these things is not free..but all the same quality and stability are important and the foundation of all your new innovations. I can appreciate trying to keep up the momentum with new items...but the new stuff gets devalued when the software itself runs sluggish and unstable.  We shouldn't be scared to use them because everything takes forever and then crashes.

iclone and cc3 are great products,  and worth complaining about - ironically enough! :w00t:

Cheers!

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"To define Tao is to defile it" - Lao Tzu

I have long claimed there is a lot of room for "optimization" in iClone, especially for the native renderer (and for the realtime editing environment too).

I do not have access to the source code, so I admit my claim is speculation, but is also supported observation, reading between the lines, and by years of experience on the development side of numerous software applications.  Over time you gradually collect more and more inefficient routines that run but have room for improvement, so memory usage and minor slowdowns add up and become serious issues.  You also get "spaghetti code" that is convoluted and difficult to maintain.  The simple term is "technical debt."

Cleaning up technical debt is not as sexy as promoting new features, but eventually it is such a drain on the system for both the users and the developers that you really need to address it before your customers abandon you for greener pastures.

Some of the examples given in this thread are excellent:
- One or two avatars work great, but four or five or more kill your system.  In 2014 a 2-character scene might have been reasonable, but customers expect more now.
- Previous CC3 characters are okay, but the new CC3+ characters have a massive impact on memory usage.  Some increase is understandable, but what was described in this thread sounds excessive, especially for a "real time" application like iClone.

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iClone 7... Character Creator... Substance Designer/Painter... Blender... Audacity...
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I just want to post an update that I found out why my scene was so slow when I complained the other day.

I created this prop called Wall with Lights because I liked the look of it.

After going crazy with 15 seconds in between every time I touched IClone, I saved my project and as a test I started deleting the floor lights:



I first tried deleting the spot light or point light associated with the floor lights and the wall lights at the top. That still took forever, and I noticed each set of floor lights was 3,300 triangles and each Wall light was 2,700, so it was 6,000 per wall segment with 17 segments created the 100,000 triangles.
The triangles aren't the problem, it is something weird with these lights, so I started deleting floor lights and wall lights.

Each time I deleted a few sets of floor lights, IClone started speeding up. 

By the time the wall and floor lights were gone, the 15 seconds is down to .1 seconds. I can now move around IClone without any lag with just the 17 interior walls, 3 exterior walls, a floor, roof and two planes that are glass walls.




The scene looks boring now, so I have to create my own lights or something, but I wanted to report my criticism for IClone being unusable was due to those two particular props, the light tools cause IClone to slow down too much. I have used other big scenes and not had a problem like this. 

At least now I am 12 x more productive, so my advice to the original poster is you might take a look at your scene and try deleting stuff till you find the culprit(s).




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I agree that IClone's performance needs to be better. A lot better! It's one of the major setbacks that this software has for making films. There's a reason why a lot of the films that are made with IClone have such a small scale. When you start adding numerous characters, and getting creative with your sets (even decimated, low poly characters are 0.4 gigs of memory each!) the program bogs down to a crawl. Add 8 characters, and you've already maxed out your graphics card. 4K Character? Forget it, 2.8-3.4gb of memory each.

Sure with enough headaches, and breaking scenes in parts; you can scoot around any scene you want to make. However, that comes at a price, making sacrifices to certain things along the way.

There's a lot of us that want to make films in IClone alone - not in Unreal/Unity/Blender, but in IClone. It has all the functionality we need (and you guys do a great job at adding more features) but get that performance better, and you're going to start seeing some really creative films being made; which ultimately helps promote the software even more.

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I agree with this whole thing, particularly what James said. I want to make films--in iClone--not games or still images. And I want to do it in iClone, even though I could do it in Unreal, that's not the software I like. I like iClone. 

I bought the full early bird upgrade package, but I held off on installing it--any of it--and these problems/issues are why. I won't install them until I can either afford a bigger hard drive, get a better computer overall, or ideally, the file size and performance issues are fixed. I can't--my system won't handle the kind of problems being described here. And, sadly, my budget isn't going to allow for a better system for some time. 

I spend a great deal of time now attaching props and things to characters, sending to them to CC3 reducing their polys and merging their textures, etc.. I'm thrilled I can (much, much harder to do something like that in Daz, although I have the plugins to at least lower the map sizes). And I have managed to get 8 characters in one scene, using LOD functions (thank you for those! They are a godsend) for the background ones. But I, too, have had scenes with only two characters and one tiny prop (using only an HDRI for background, zero other anything), become so large and unwieldy the support team had to fix it for me. If that can happen with no props and no effects and only 30 seconds of dialogue, and they were CC3, not CC3 Plus. 

It makes me sad not to play with these new features--they look so cool--but I don't dare, so hopefully the Reallusion team will find some solutions. 

Pretty, pretty please?
--Nicole




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