Hey there,

I starter learning Houdini recently and it's been great however for animation theres a lot of lag for some reason.

I tried to animate a basic object in animate view, worked fine and no lag, however once I rigged a character with some bones it really heavily lags when trying to do anything with it.

It's animating at about 4-6 fps, wether or not i enable real time.

The object is very minimal, it has bones and weights but it's not complex on textures or anything (screenshot below)

I cant figure out what to press so it i can animate and preview at a proper framerate. Is there a disable everything but the bare essentials button i'm missing?

System Spec:
Houdini 17.5.386
Windows 10
I9-9900K @3.6K CPU
GeForce RTX2080 TI
64GB Ram

Model is all flat colors, retopologised maybe 50k polys

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!!!

Try the sunglasses with the play icon, viewport rightside.

Are the rig's skin capture weights frozen? I can see cooking capture weights every frame making the rig glacially slow.

You can also use the Performance Monitor to see what's cooking that shouldn't be (like jsmack's capture weight example). Generally only the deform and/or blendshape SOPs should be cooking during animation in the skin geometry.

I might be having a similar issue. Just used the performance monitor, much of the time is marked unaccounted. What is unaccounted?

Currently looking for a solution with this as well. I have a simple animation on screen and its sluggish. I may be wrong, but when Animation Editor is open during playback, it bogs the program down because it's trying to constantly refresh the scene data? Try hiding your Animation Editor during playback and see if it plays back real time. If I find a better solution I'll re-post here.

Side note: A good hotkey to know is “v” to bring up the curves for any selected node.

Hi !!

In your rig :
- Try to lock EVERY unnecessary node parameters (translate, rotate….)
- Prefer instancing parameters than using constraints
- Once capture geometry is done, lock the last node.
- If you habe blendshapes, use “Cache Inputs Deltas”
- Put your rig in a HDA and lock it as well
- Hide as many object as you can (bones, nulls…)
- try to use proxies mesh to unvoid mesh deformation

Hope that's helps