Hair that slows posing in the viewport

marble

I'm sure I am not the only one who suffers from this but I might be someone who finds it more frustrating than most. I have several hair products that I would use often if only they didn't kill the viewport movement flow almost stone dead. Try to bend an arm, for example, and my viewport takes a few seconds to react and the movement is so slow. I believe this is due to fibre hair but some vendors who make such hair products seem to have overcome the problem to an acceptable degree. For example, RedzStudio hair is useable and there's even a special feature with some of their hair just to show "Guide Hairs" in the viewport. Conversely, I would love to use the Curly Bun hair more but it is probably the worst offender for killing my viewport. I just can't work with it.

So my question is: am I missing a trick? Is there a way to have this hair loaded yet not affect the perfomance so badly? I should mention that I have a decent PC with a Ryzen 5 5600X CPU, 64GB RAM and a RTX 3090 GPU so it is not as though I'm trying to work on a 10 year old laptop. By the way, making the hair invisible in the viewport does not help.

nicstt

I see the same; if im using a hair that causes that, I tend to remove it until needed.

Redz

The scalp on the curly bun looks to have a smoothing modifier and interactive update turned on. This may be what's slowing down the viewport, as it's not an especially heavy hair as dForce hair goes. The other thing you can do is slect the hair and set the viewport tesselation sides to zero. Note the hair won't show in the Iray viewport in this case.

marble

Redz said:

The scalp on the curly bun looks to have a smoothing modifier and interactive update turned on. This may be what's slowing down the viewport, as it's not an especially heavy hair as dForce hair goes. The other thing you can do is slect the hair and set the viewport tesselation sides to zero. Note the hair won't show in the Iray viewport in this case.

Great to get an expert view, thank you. I'll have a look at the smoothing modifier but I have not noticed that smoothing in general slows down my performance significantly although I see that you mention interactive which does make a difference so I will check that. As for tesselation - I didn't know there was a setting for that ... I'll have to see if I can find it. If it can be switched on and off without having to reload the scene or the figure, then that might be an option.

marble

Update:

So turning off interactive smoothing for the scalp did not make a significant difference although I can't undertand why it is on in the first place, not to mention at such a high setting (18).

However, turning off Line Tesselation made a huge difference and posing performace in the viewport (OpenGL) returned to normal. The hair does not become totally invisible as the shape of the hair can see be seen but it seems to render as normal.

Taoz

Just a side note: using Perspective View seems to slow down the viewport in general, I believe it has to do with the fixed Headlamp as using a Camera with Headlamp turned off often helps a lot. 

Richard Haseltine

Taoz said:

Just a side note: using Perspective View seems to slow down the viewport in general, I believe it has to do with the fixed Headlamp as using a Camera with Headlamp turned off often helps a lot. 

The Perspective View headlamp, and camera headlamps without an override set, erspect the setting in Render Settings

nicstt

I see the same; if im using a hair that causes that, I tend to remove it until needed.

My camera headlight is never on

Taoz

Richard Haseltine said:

Taoz said:

Just a side note: using Perspective View seems to slow down the viewport in general, I believe it has to do with the fixed Headlamp as using a Camera with Headlamp turned off often helps a lot. 

The Perspective View headlamp, and camera headlamps without an override set, erspect the setting in Render Settings

Are "Scene Lights" any lights including HDRI? 

Since I practically always use some kind of non-Headlamp light (at least Iray default Environment light) that would mean that Perspective Headlamp is never turned on. 

AFAIR I tested it by turning Camera Headlamp on/off which made the same difference.  I'll do another test when I have the opportunity, to check if that's correct.

 

marble

I have a default scene which is what I always start with and in that I have any camera headlight turned off ("Never On" in the settings). I really don't know why DAZ insist on having it on by default. My default lighting is HDRi in the environment and I add spotlights as required for the scene.

I don't believe that HDRi is recognised as scene lights so I always have to toggle CTRL-L when I open a scene (there seems to be no way of changing that default behaviour).

Richard Haseltine

The headlamp is suppressed only by actual light nodes, not HDRIs or emissive surfaces. The setting I meant is the one labelled Auto Headlamp in the general group

marble

Richard Haseltine said:

The headlamp is suppressed only by actual light nodes, not HDRIs or emissive surfaces. The setting I meant is the one labelled Auto Headlamp in the general group

Yes - that's what I meant in the first part of my response ... the camera headlamp. I was not aware that it is suppressed at all but then I never have it turned on - as I said, I always have that General Group setting at "Never".

The second part of my reply was about the scene preview lighting (CTRL-L) toggle.