Plug-in Newton problem

[LastBlake]

I'm new to AE. Help me deal with the plug-in Newton. When I model physics, it goes very slowly. What could be the problem? The processor and RAM are loaded at this time not by 100%.

[Mylenium]

I don't follow. By its nature Newton is a simulation plug-in that is dependent on linear evaluation. Until you actualyl have run the simulation and baked it out to keyframes, it will always be slow since it still needs to run up all the simulation frames even if you scrub. Conversely, AE itself will take time to actually render the simulated frames, which depending on what you actualyl did may take a while. I'm afraid you have a wrong understanding and seriously need to read the help files for the plug-in as well as AE itself. This stuff simply isn't interactive for any number of reasons.

Mylenium

[Rick Gerard · Accepted solution]

Welcome to the world of motion graphics. Unless they are very simple the process of rendering is very slow. You have to plan for it. I have a render running on my render machine that is taking about 8 minutes a frame. On the other hand the project next in the cue will probably render at about 15 frames a second.

As Mylenium stated simulations take a long time to calculate. As you gain experience you will be able to more accurately judge how long a project will take.

One thing that may help would be to set your magnification ratio to 50% or less and set the Comp Panel resolution to Auto. This doesn't help much with the simulation calculations but it will speed up calculating the pixels.

Many newbies just jump in to AE and set everything to Full resolution, add in all their effects, then try and run previews. A more efficient workflow, especially when you are animating position, is to run what is commonly called a pencil test. When you are moving things around make sure that all of the effects are turned off, that motion blur is turned off, and if it will help, set the comp to draft mode. You check how the motion works. When you get the motion working the way you want it to work you start turning on the effects and motion blur, and when you get more experience, you end up just checling a few frames at full resolution with all effects, then you send the project to the renderer and move on to the next comp. This is a lot like the workflow that cell animators use. They sketch the animations with pencil, capture the drawings (animation camera or flip chart) and then run their "pencil test." If the scene works they send the pencil drawings out to another department for Ink and Paint. Then the final movie is made. Any other workflow is terribly inefficient.

I hope this helps.

[P.M.B]

I cannot remember both off the top of my head but there is are a couple of options in newton to increase simulation times.  One is to reduce the mesh precision which I believe is directly tied to the collision precision, so depending on your scene this may or may not be an option.  The other option (the one I can't recall) I believe replaces the meshes with proxy shapes but this is only for speeding up set up & preview.  The actual final conversion to keyframes cannot use the proxy shapes. obviously (or not).