[Steven Bowser]

I have had a great time using Animation Paper, but on my current project it began to slow down drastically when I reached around 140 frames, especially when using Cutting and Lasso features, when Undoing, and when Saving. My PC doesn’t seem to be struggling at all (RAM and CPU don’t seem stressed when I monitor them. I have 16GB of RAM). I do recall the program asking me not to Lasso something because it was too taxing, but it never asked me that again.

Is this just an optimization issue? Not sure what causes it or what I can do to alleviate it.

Thanks!

[Steven Bowser]

To clarify: I suffer from slowdown, and program gives me the Windows mouse loading circle, and the program will say “not responding” on the top, and this is just for clicking “Undo”. It’s slowing me down to a crawl. 🙁

[Niels]

Yes, this happens when you lasso and stamp numerous times in the same drawing. Everything else, including lassoing in other drawings, works at full speed. You get the warning when it takes 2 seconds to pick up a lasso selection. This is already bad. If you continue lassoing in the same drawing it just get worse.

Best to try not to lasso extensively in the same drawing (and don’t make copies of that “bad” drawing). To reset such a drawing, you can do a new blank and trace it using the light table. And then just delete the “bad” drawing.

Everything else works at full speed, it’s just the overly lassoed drawing (when picking up or stamping or undoing the pick up or stamping) and possible copies of it.

[Steven Bowser]

I’m not sure I understand. By “same drawing” do you mean within the same frame? Or do you mean the same “object”, as in if I make something travel across the frame by copying instead of drawing new frames?

Also I don’t believe this solves the Undo issue. Even when I avoid the Lasso feature I still have a freezing situation when using Undo. Is that also because of the Lasso stuff?

[Niels]

By drawing I mean the whole frame worth of lines, but only in the one layer. In Animation Paper we call that a “drawing”. The combined “drawings” from ALL your layers we call the “frame”. Drawing is in one frame, but only one layer. Frame is all the layers combined. I hope I’m not messing that explanation up. 🙂 Anyway the lassoed selections are kept in memory for various good reasons as an entity. Having many of them in the same drawing will cause it to slow when you need to pick up or stamp even more.

Undo does the same lasso calculations but in reverse, so it will be slow too in those situations. But again, only when doing these problematic lasso stamps.

So in general, in all other situations, Undo will be fast. Let me know if you find a situation where it is not.

[Christopher Wade]

Im running into a little bit of that myself but in a different sort of way. Im fairly messy when I sletch so the program tends to chug if it I sketch far too quickly. I seems ir reaches “peak lag” state in which the drawings I know were intended as curves are interpreted by AP as several straight lines.

Not a huge deal since this program is in alpha but its something worth looking into in the future.

[Niels]

Hi Christopher, OK, thanks. That doesn’t sound right. What resolution are you sketching in? What are the specs of your computer?

[Christopher Wade]

Resolution is 3840×2160, 24fps.

Computer Specs:

Processor – AMD Ryzen 7 1700 8-Core Processor 3.00 GHZ
Installed RAM – 32 GB
System Type: 64-bit, x64-based processor
Windows 10

[Niels]

OK, 4K resolution is very demanding.

I would rather work in lower resolution to get great speed and lag free drawing. As you may already know, Animation Paper will scale perfectly without degradation, blur or loss, so you can safely work at 2K or even 1K. And then just go to 4K or higher when you later want to export.

[Christopher Wade]

Yeah, exporting higher provides a good workaround. I tend to work 4k in other art programs for various reasons up to and including client-request so hopefully AP will have this worked out in later builds. Not saying I have the fastest computer around but considering Adobe Flash (vector) and Clip Studio (raster and optional vector) can handle many of my 4k drawings without lag, it might be worth looking into.

[Niels]

Sure. The drawing-engines are of course different and does different things. But we have plenty of things we can do to optimise. We will look into it when we get to it pretty soon. 🙂 Thanks!