Improving Rig Viewport Performance for Blender Armatures

Posted on Sept. 28, 2020, 10:29 p.m. by crute • Last updated on Dec. 28, 2021, 9:17 a.m.

Performance Issues with Smutbase Rigs

You have downloaded a model from Smutbase, opened it up and now, to your horror, you realise that you can only move it at 1.3FPS.

Fret not, there are a few steps you can take to improve your viewport performance:

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  1. Make sure you are in Solid Mode

  2. Set Simplify on your scene and reduce the level of Viewport Subdivisions

  3. Go through the Modifier Stack and disable performance heavy modifiers for viewport, such as

  • Subdivision,
  • Bevel,
  • Shrinkwrap,
  • Remesh
  1. Remove unneeded textures from the node tree until you meet the OpenGL limit of 7 for

Eevee support

  1. If you have Normal Maps in your Materials, Eevee Performance suffers.

This addon helps
https://github.com/theoldben/BlenderNormalGroups

It works by turning off the normal maps and giving you a substitute node setup for them. Before rendering, hit a button in the Node View and everything goes back to the way it was before:

  1. Disable Physics Simulations like Cloth, Softbody and Collision.

  2. Auto-Smooth Normals is also costly in terms of performance, but it can only be turned off per object from the Mesh Tab.

  3. Shapekeys have a performance impact when they are not OFF or at 0 value. Especially if their values are controlled by a driver (the fields will be highlighted in purple). It is recommended to only have shapekeys on the mesh that actually do something to it.