Saturday, February 1, 2020

Posing performance

The Merge Rigs button changed slightly in the latest version. Now all meshes are put in a separate sub-collection under the armature's collection, like this:
This makes it easy to temporarily exclude all meshes from the scene. This is useful e.g. when importing many poses to an action, because after loading each frame the scene is updated, and most of the time is spent updating heavy meshes.

As a test, I imported a directory with 78 pose files. It took 32 seconds with the meshes in the scene, but only 2 seconds with the meshes excluded, i.e. a speed-up with a factor of 16. Not bad!

To get that speed-up, the meshes must belong to a collection which is excluded from the scene. Just hiding meshes in the viewport does not improve loading speed. Apparently hidden meshes are still updated.