Do this to optimize your rigs' performances in Blender 👀

- Character's rig, no matter how powerful your computer is, can get very laggy real quick. Often enough, you can no longer get a real-time playback in your 3D viewport. And that's one animator's worst nightmare. I'm Pierrick from P2design, and in this video, I will show you how you can drastically improve your rigs' performances. Let's get started. (Pierrick kissing cat) (screen whooshing) (tranquil music) Before we try to solve the problem, we need to understand it, and this is the problem we w

ant to solve. We have a simple animation of the cube and the frame rate is below 24 frame per second. Now, this is not exactly a simple cube. This is a cube with a lot of subdivision and a vertex count of almost 900,000 vertices. So you may think that I'm totally dumb and the solution is to use the real cube and we are done. But if I now switch to another cube, you can see that my frame rate is 24 frame per second, and we have a smooth animation but this one also has almost 900,000 vertices, so

I may not be so dumb in the end. So if it's not the dumber of polygons, and those two cubes use the same rig, what makes the difference? Let's have a quick look to the rig. It's made of three bones, a squash and stretch bone, a root bone and one deformation bone. And both cube are using the same rig. Checking the red cube, we can see that it has a subdivision modifier with a label of six subdivisions and it has an armature modifier. It's bound to the armature using only one deformation group, co

rresponding to the deformation bone in the middle. If we now check the blue cube, it also has a subdivision modifier with a level of six subdivisions, but it has no armature modifier. The cube deformation is driven by the bone as the cube is a child of the bone. And while there's no visual difference between the blue cube and the red cube deformation wise, the way these deformation are calculated is pretty different. The red cube uses an armature modifier to deform. On each frame, the position o

f each of vertices is calculated based on those modifiers, while on the blue cube it's child and parent relationship, and those deformation are calculated at the object level. It's like scaling and moving the cube object instead of moving each vertices separately. So how can we apply this to a character rig? As an example, I will use my character rig trident from the course "Alive!" You can also get this rig for free on P2design-academy.com. The first thing you want is to put your armature into

rest position. This way, you're sure there is no transformation applied to any bones. And if you have an action active, just close it. Now what we do is to jump back into object mode, select our character object, and duplicate it, and move it to a new collection. It's important to separate your object in different collections. The idea is to be able to deactivate the collection in which the slow object is. If you just hide the object, you won't get that much performance improvement. But if you d

eactivate the collection, then the object is no longer calculated at all, and you get smooth animation. Once your mesh is duplicated, you can give it a more relevant name, like Trident Low Poly or whatever. And then the idea is to remove the modifier that slows down the 3D viewport. In our case, the subdivision modifier, and the armature modifier. Then you need to show only the skin and bone or deformation bones. On this rig, it's the very first layer. I have some corrective bones but I will onl

y be using the main deformation bones. From there, as I see my rig in transparency, I will tap into edit mode and the idea is to separate your character in different objects. So basically, I just follow the topology of the character and I try to cut him in different slices. Double clicking to select a loop, then pressing V to reap the vertices. Once two loop are reaped, I can press L to select the vertices in between, and P to separate them. I now have a new object and I will repeat the process

for all the bones along my character's body. So it's a bit of a tedious process and I let you know how much time it took me to prepare the rig in a few seconds but believe me, it's worth it. I worked on a project where it was such a pain to animate because I couldn't reach a real-time viewport playback. And we used this method and it was such a joy afterward. So the little time spent here will definitely be worth it later on. Then you should give each part a relevant name. That's why I display t

he different bones' name. I will give all those objects the same name as the bone. And once you are done with that, first, select one of the object, then the armature, and go into pose mode. Then press Control + P to parent the object to the bone and choose Bone. Now, you don't need to go back and forth into object mode to be able to select the other object. Just use the outliner, then select the next bone. Press Control + P and choose bone. And you'll need to do that for all the separated piece

s of your character. Now, there's one exception. I advise you to keep your head rig separate. So basically, just separate the head of your character and give it an armature modifier. Separating the face in small pieces is really not ideal, so I keep the head as a classic rigged mesh but the other part of the body will be children of the different bones in my armature. Before I show you the final result, I just wanna let you know that my friend Yan, also known as YanSculpts, is back on YouTube an

d is running a sale on his Gumroad. He has great courses to learn character sculpting and character modeling in Blender. You'll find an affiliate link in the description below. And by supporting him, you are also supporting my channel. Use the code below to get 25% off on all his products. Converting and parenting the model took me 35 minutes. If I play the animation on the example rig, I get to about seven to eight frame per second. Note that this is a test rig. The original rig is optimized fo

r the best performances. Now if I switch to our proxy model, I get a real-time playback without any problem. So next time you build a rig, once you're done, if it's too laggy, just think about this trick. I'm sure you already spotted this kind of geometry on this kind of character. In feature film breakdowns, you can use the proxy model for almost the whole animation process. And when polishing, you can switch to the high poly model. This is the end of this video. I hope you enjoyed it and I'll

see you in the next one. (tranquil music)