Frame rate drop when adding keyframes

[Anonymous]

Hi all, I've done a lot of searching on this problem and tried several fixes, but so far nothing has worked. I have a complex rig for a baby dinosaur, including several facial controls. The rig was designed by someone who has done very similar work for us before and we have not run into this issue, making me think it's a problem with this particular rig. The scene is referencing a master rig. When beginning to set keyframes, the viewport frame rate is fine - around 24 fps or higher. As I set more and more keys, the frame rate drops to under half. The same thing happens with the master rig as well, so it doesn't seem to be a file referencing issue. There are no additional objects around the rig except a simple plane.

I have tried several fixes: deleting history on the mesh (that disconnects the rig from the mesh and does not fix the lag), clamping textures (the mesh has very high-res textures but the lag continues with or without them, even with just a simple lambert applied), changing Viewport 2.0 settings, keeping my driver up to date, trying older versions of the driver, keeping the mesh resolution the lowest I can, hiding parts of the mesh I don't need (teeth and claws.)

I'm running Maya 2018 on Windows 10, and I have an IBuyPower desktop with an i7-7700 3.60GHz core, 16 GB of ram, and a GTX 1060. I've included dropbox links to the untextured animated scene (Albert_Baby_FacialTest2) as well as the scene it references (Albert_Baby_Test).  Sorry for the links - I tried attaching the file and the post wasn't going through. If anyone could shed some light on this it would be much appreciated!

FacialTest2: https://drive.google.com/open?id=10NJn4N6b42XfN0vIqsEfJ4Tza_ORDFiz

Baby_Test: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1FFdQ_BCZskIVnuKaB00M5z7tcIv_27rF

[mspeer]

Hi!

I don't have much time to test this, but for me this looks like a problem caused by the complexity of the setup.

Mass of:

joints + constraints + transform nodes + lattices

this will get every system down.

An additional proxy setup might have been helpful here.

[Anonymous]

My other animator has it even worse. Her frame rate was down to 2 fps. Is there any possible way I can delete the history without destroying the rig? Or should I ask our rigger to create a proxy?

[mspeer]

Hi!

In a short test i was not able to see any history, except for one node that had mass NodeEditorBookmarks (i don't think that's a problem). So i think (without further tests) there is nothing you can do to speed this up.

It would be helpful to disable some evaluations, but i have not seen any option where this could be done without breaking the rig. There is simply too much calculation needed for every vertex based on this mass of influences (i forgot to add BlendShapes to my previous list).

I would have done a proxy or a "simpler" to animate rig with secondary animations/influences that could be disabled by animators, but this could be very time intense to do now.