• Maxon Cinema 4D

  General speed/upgrade enquiry.

  Posted by John Davies on February 4, 2013 at 1:52 pm

  I’m looking to speed up the viewport refresh/response in C4D, and am reading varying advice online. I was looking at a graphics card upgrade
  soon but unsure of where this will help with C4D.

  I am happy enough to cope with long render times and let these run over night or while I work on my other machine, it’s just painstakingly slow (by the end of a full project) to look around my scene or even move the simplest of objects.

  Current set-up:

  Windows 7 x64
  16GB RAM
  i7-2600K
  NVidia GT240

  I know my GPU is way out of date and most likely never intended for anything like 3D work. I was hoping to stick a GTX 680 in there, due to recommendation for AE work, but will this help with the viewport activity in Cinema at all?

  Any help appreciated,

  Adam Trachtenberg replied 13 years, 3 months ago 5 Members · 5 Replies
• 5 Replies

• 

  Dan Conrad

  February 4, 2013 at 10:23 pm

  Did you simply try changing the “level of detail” in your viewport settings?@mographcandy

  @mographcandy
• 

  John Davies

  February 5, 2013 at 4:56 am

  Thanks Dan, I hadn’t seen that before. That’s helped a bit, but losing a lot of assets is a problem when the % drops too low, maybe that’s only with the plug-ins I’m using. I can work with this for now though, thanks!
• 

  Yotam Monk

  February 5, 2013 at 2:18 pm

  hi john
  i am having the same dilema..
  any insights so far?
  i thought about the nvidia quadro 600
  its around 150$
  what do you thinck?
• 

  Darby Edelen

  February 6, 2013 at 6:21 am

  Setting up some Layers should also help you. You can disable or solo specific layers in the viewport to speed up interaction. I don’t actually do this all that often, but I really should 🙂

  Darby Edelen
• 

  Adam Trachtenberg

  February 6, 2013 at 3:26 pm

  Cinema doesn’t have drivers to take advantage of quadro cards, so buying a quadro would be a waste of money. You’re generally better off going with the fastest gamer-type card available. Last I checked the ATI cards were faster than nVidia, but I tend to stay away from them because of their sometimes balky OGL support.

  In your case a processor upgrade would probably help, too. The cpu can be a bottleneck for editor speed, especially if you have a lot of Xpresso/TP going on.

  Aside from that, there are other things you can do to speed up editor refresh:

  * cache mograph and physics (and TP via mograph);
  * if you have thousands of small objects that don’t need to be separate objects, connect them into one object (makes a huge difference);
  * take advantage of generators like hypernurbs that provide for separate viewport and render resolutions;
  * turn off animation if you don’t need to see the scene animating;
  * use layer system and solo the layers you need;
  * use render instances instead of geometry where possible (mogrqaph, TP);
  * etc.

  An ad firm wanted to hire me to optimize a scene they were having trouble with because they were having trouble navigating the viewport. I told them to select all their cloners and check the “render instances” box. Problem solved. Fortunately they had some other work for me. 😉

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