"C4D Scene Speed" Article. TONS of Workflow Tips

[froj 0]

If you think C4D's viewport is THAT slow, then please read this first and try and help yourself out. Over the last few years, in between cursing and sending feature requests to Maxon I've forced myself to learn to embrace, understand and workaround what at first seems like a lot of toys that you can't play with at the same time. After realising most users don't even use layers, I decided to spend a few days putting this together as a resource - so hopefully some won't have to go through the same issues as I did!

 

I'm no programmer so this is 9 pages of practical layman's information, calculation explanations, proxy setup, layers, new xpresso nodes. There's a lot of stuff!

 

https://matt-frodsham.squarespace.com/c4d-scene-speed

 

Please let me know what you think, please don't hesitate to send me any corrections or extra info and I'll add it!

 

Cheers, Matt

 

[theta 0]

Thanks for taking the time to post that. It helped a lot. I've been using layers for a while to help isolate stuff, just not turning off Generators and stuff, that made a pretty big difference.

 

The "Render Instances" in the cloner is what killed me on my last project, they were being effected by effectors individually, so I couldn't turn that on, but when I did it helped a lot too.

 

 

What's the deal with turning off the "All Frames" option in the Playback settings? It helps speed things up by not trying to load all the frames at once?

 

One other thing I noticed with the Level of detail. In the Options menu you only have Low, Med, or High . But if you go into Project Settings, you have control from 0% to 100%, which can give you more control if you need it.

[J Montreuil 0]

That's awesome. Thanks!

[douwe 0]

Good stuff. Thanks.

 

Maybe interesting to consider xRefs and Redraw Limit as well ?

d

[Srek 0]

Thanks for taking the time to post that. It helped a lot. I've been using layers for a while to help isolate stuff, just not turning off Generators and stuff, that made a pretty big difference.

 

The "Render Instances" in the cloner is what killed me on my last project, they were being effected by effectors individually, so I couldn't turn that on, but when I did it helped a lot too.

 

 

What's the deal with turning off the "All Frames" option in the Playback settings? It helps speed things up by not trying to load all the frames at once?

 

One other thing I noticed with the Level of detail. In the Options menu you only have Low, Med, or High . But if you go into Project Settings, you have control from 0% to 100%, which can give you more control if you need it.

All Frames ensures that each and every frame will be evaluated and displayed at playback time, no matter how long it takes per frame. With the option off CINEMA 4D tries to match the exact FPS setting for smooth playback, at the cost of frames beeing dropped. Dropping frames is not much of an issue if you use MoGraph, but it will produce an incorrect display for setups that depend on previous frames (i.e. TP)

[Mylenium 0]

Neat and quite comprehensive. Have to give this a second look when I have time to actually read it. ;-)

 

Mylenium

[froj 0]

Thanks guys. I will include a few extras including redraw prefs and a few others that have been suggested. I'll wait a few days and round up all the suggestions first

 

I guess I will include a note about Xrefs... I left it out on purpose because for me they're not even worth considering it I will write something to make sure people know why

 

Basically they cause me more trouble than they're worth. Tried them time and time again and I don't get the responsiveness or stability I need to rely on during a project. In R13 they were just too buggy for words, I imported a scene I'd built (and collapsed) and ended up with a 2000m fire extinguisher that would jump around when scrubbing through the timeline. In R14 we tried it for something 'easy' and made a shader library using one for the last banque populaire. By the end of the project we had to hide the xref from the server so the scenes it was used it would actually load.

 

So honestly, unless you are using them to save file size, I can't recommend them to increase Viewport speed in this instance. But if they work for you, fantastic

[simonfarussell 0]

Thanks for putting the post together, some lovely nuggets in there.

It maybe nice if you download your HQ/LQ layer Xpresso set up to have a play with, mainly because I'm lazy though.

[froj 0]

The thing with that is Niklas is working on a similar plugin right now that is a better solution, so I'd wait for that for the 'lazy' version. If you already know a bit of Xpresso (and honestly, I'm crap at it) then you can probably make something great by looking at the explanations. It's really just feeding 0,1 or 2 to the relevant ports..

[Mylenium 0]

I guess I will include a note about Xrefs... I left it out on purpose because for me they're not even worth considering

Same here. Would love to use them for my CAD stuff, but as it stands, calling them bitchy would be an understatement...

 

Mylenium

[krpdesign 1]

glad to hear its not just me having troubles with xRefs.

it sounds so good in theory, but was way more of a pain then it was worth.

perhaps its better with large teams of people working on same project simultaneously.

 

but for me, working solo,

 

copy > paste into null > reset PSR = way better

[froj 0]

Exactly, for a small team (we are usually 3-ish producing a big project) this works, just means building up a good relationship and rhythm so we don't step on each others toes. Nothing bad has ever happened (touch wood).

 

The ironic thing with Xrefs seems to be very slow (especially with textures) over our server.. so locally its probably ok-ish but you REALLY should be using them in teams.. over a server. We'll see what happens in future. Some people seem to be using them just fine but I guess they have more 'sensible' scenes...

 

I'll do a 'general workflow' kind of thing at some point but the 'reset PSR' button hidden in the character menu is the FIRST thing I dock when I make a new layout

[Mylenium 0]

Personally I'm not so much concerned with speed issues, but I just hate when scenes break down with XRefs. It's always like you import a handful assemblies without issues and then on the next one the scene crashes. This is especially noticeable when they are identical hierarchies, so it seems to me C4D can't isolate them properly and mixes up things that are named and ordered identically.

 

Mylenium

[douwe 0]

Just saw this on twitter :

http://hypolylab.tumblr.com/post/56898977120/mutelayers

 

MuteLayers

MuteLayers script does pretty much just that. Select the layers you would like to mute and run the script or press the icon. Press the icon again with the same layers selected, and the normal state of the layer manager will return. If you press and hold shift while running or clicking the MuteLayers icon, all other layers will be muted. Again, press and hold shift while the same layers are selected and the layer manager will return to normal.

MuteLayers

 

[J Montreuil 0]

That's pretty interesting.

[froj 0]

It's incredible is what it is, I love this community. I bitched about something convincingly enough and he made that within the same day! I'll be growing the article towards the end of the week to include this and other things!

[creativebloke 0]

awesome work on the c4d article, and like others will read it properly when life slows down, i have never had any major issues with x-refs especially in r14 for cad stuff, but i realise i have just totally jinxed myself...

[froj 0]

Thanks, and I'm definitely glad to hear Xrefs are fine for some

 

I just updated with Hypoly's 'Mute Layer' script, Florian Sepp's 'Preview Accelerator', viewport prefs as per recommendation, and an explanation regarding xrefs.

 

http://www.mattfrodsham.com/c4d-scene-speed

[levante 0]

Thanks for the article froj. I've had my share of problems with x-refs too - especially when rendering with NET. I usually had to convert the x-refs on render time and re-link some textures that where missing. But apart from that, they can be extremely handy when dealing with stuff like CAD car models that are used in a lot of shots. Especially when the client decides to swap out the rims after everything is animated and rendered...

[froj 0]

I heard that they've had a tune up in R15 as well, like I said I give them one decent change per release and try them out now and again for simple things like that. I just always feel so nervous and am bitten more often than not.. fingers crossed for the future

 

I added a recommendation for the Magic Solo plugin. Seems to be the cleanest option for that function, creates a temporary layer and assigns the whole scene to it except your selected objects so everything gets killed properly. Then of course everything is put safely back when you un-solo! Nitro Man does it again

[jrueckert 0]

I also want to thank you, froj. As someone who is new to C4D, I can always appreciate learning new things about really great software. Your post was very informative and I will be referencing it a ton. Cheers mate.

[simonfarussell 0]

FS Preview Render is good too although I'm getting problems running it on a freelance machine

[kossome 0]

This is really great. Thank you!

[wysee 0]

Thank you for all the good tips!!

and thank you for your great Octane review.