Why does my SIMPLE character model playback MUCH slower than complex background?

Support Basics & Interface
1

I am making an animation in blender 2.74. I have a layer with a character in it and one with a background. The full character model with clothes etc has 15,322 tris. The background has 364,817 tris in it, more than 20 times as much. However, when I try to playback the layer with the character, it plays at 1 fps, while the layer with the complex background plays at ~8 fps. I don’t understand why this happens, it makes no sense.:confused:

I have hidden the hair, am in solid mode, and have ‘only render’ on. There’s no trouble with the other characters (on separate layers) in this animation, just this one. I’ve tried hiding the rig, hiding everything but the rig, hiding the clothes, moving layers, but nothing helps. If I put the character and background on the same layer, the animation plays extremely slowly, and the same happens if I turn on both layers at the same time.

ANY help would REALLY be appreciated!:frowning:

2

the framerate is affected by how many things that is being manipulated. a character usually have many complex bones, witch tend to play slowly.

depending on what you have in the background,but lets say you have simple trees, or cars. the cars have 1 bone (or even 0) witch tells the WHOLE thing to just move stright forward. witch is quite simple, and wont affect the framerate much. the tree has 2-5 bones depending on how complex you want it, witch is still not a lot. also the bones are simple, no IKs or anything like that.

so basically, the framerate is mostly affected by how much is being changed, not how many things there are.

3

and tips, delete EVERY keyframe that does not do anything, like if you locked any scale keys etc. also if one bone is only rotating, delete every translate keyframe. basically, everything that is not nessasary. that will speed you up. also, if u have a subsurface modifier, turn down the view value.

4

Thanks for the help, really appreciated. Turns out the answer was really simple. My character had a cloth simulation trying to run at the same time, and even if it was not calculating it (because I was skipping frames with AV sync) it was still trying to…?

Anyway, solved.