Hi,

I'm trying to track down what's causing severe performance issues with some of the scenes that the animators are working with. So far the biggest culprit seems to be the assets themselves. Even though only a character asset is being displayed/cooked, other non-displayed assets are causing major slowdowns even though the performance monitor only shows cooks of the visible character.

I've been able to duplicate this issue using the skeleton asset that's available on the exchange. To reproduce..

- open fresh houdini
- load the skeleton asset
- under Controls->Body->Spine->Spine Translate Y add this ‘sin($FF)’. This is only to force the rig to cook itself. Typical rig has most of the parameters animated.
- open Performance Monitor; under ‘Monitor’ select only ‘Frame time’.
- select ‘Batch’ in the Monitor window and using arrows keys advance 5 frames and you should see the time it takes for the rig to update per frame.
- now select the original skeleton node and duplicate it 4 times so you will have total of 5 skeleton nodes.
- hide 4 nodes displaying only 1 visible skeleton
- select ‘Batch’ again in the Monitor window and advance 5 frames to see the update time.

Depending on which system I was running this test most of the time the single rig would average around ~8-12fps. The 5 skeleton version with 1 displayed would drop to ~2-3fps.
With the nodes being hidden and none of the channels/parameters being scoped, there shouldn't be any performance degradation; as the hidden nodes should not be cooking anything and not having any interdependencies. The performance monitor shows only the displayed asset cooking.

So far minimizing the number of assets in the scenes helps somewhat but there's a point where you need to have a certain number of them to do the animation itself. Anyone with ideas feel free to throw them out there.

thanks
Adam