3D Motion Designer based in Manchester UK
COLLAPSING, MERGING AND BAKING
COLLAPSING
Please have a seat, this is an intervention. You are obsessed with keeping your entire scene parametric. Yes, you! Stop that. I will talk specifically about the Generators and Deformers later, and how to optimise them while staying parametric; but seriously, if you don’t need to animate those parameters you should be hitting C to Make Editable the second you’ve finished making something. C4D can actually handle rather a lot of Polygons if that’s all they are.
Of course you should be saving iteratively and keeping an accessible parametric version in a safe place for when the client comes knocking, but all those Extrudes, Sweeps, Symmetries, Bends, Twists etc are killing your viewport and render speed
MERGING
Its no secret that C4D struggles when trying to calculate a lot of objects, but it’s important to note that this isn’t directly linked to the amount of polygons within a scene. If you can collapse and merge 100 objects with 100 polygons each to a single object with 10000 polygons its actually much faster in the viewport and when rendering. Especially if that compound object is being used as part of something else such as a Cloner, Instance or Dynamics simulation.
BAKING
This is not so cut and dry. Sometimes baking to PLA, depending on the complexity of an object, can be horrible for viewport performance. Reading so much data every frame takes a lot of calculation, but it’s usually a good idea to try and get to a point where you can lock everything down to polygons and animation (PSR and/or PLA) without using any internal calculations. This is more important towards the end of a project when rendering heavy scenes.
EXAMPLE: ZEITGUISED - BANQUE POPULAIRE / ENTREPRENEURS
If I may stray temporarily from viewport performance and encompass render time, or more specifically scene exporting/preparation during the initial render stages:
By the end of the most recent Zeitguised Banque Populaire TVC ‘Entrepreneurs’ we had reduced the entire scene to high resolution (but optimised) subdivided polygon objects; no Hypernurbs, no Caches, no Cloners if at all possible and the scenes’ geometry was exported in seconds. We were also flying through and animating almost every shot in realtime with our use of proxy objects and Layers. You can check out an in depth making of HERE.
Compare this to the first Banque Populaire advert 'Vision' (before I became an optimisation junkie): Exporting and Preparing the geometry to render could take 30 minutes or more before even starting to think about calculating a GI pass. Back then we still had ‘live’ Booles, Symmetry, hundreds of Hypernurbs, retimed Mograph Caches, Thinking Particles all within one shot. We were naive and assumed C4D could calculate anything you threw at it, moving around the scene was impossible and rendering was a nightmare... and so began my journey towards better scene speed!