Does keeping all my work in one project (overflowing project panel) slow down Character Animator?

[Kristi Hex]

For convenience I've kept almost all of my characters and animations together in one project.  Recently I made a puppet that does face & body turn and has 4 colour options for almost every layer (largest one I've created so far) and I noticed that Character Animator has slowed sygnificantly.  I can understand that the puppet is likely a bit for my computer to process in comparison to my other work but I'm wondering if my overflowing project panel may be part of the problem as well.

Thanks in advance for any advice 🙂

[alank99101739 · Accepted solution]

I have not measured it, but I think it can slow things down. CH uses a database for undo history etc. This keeps getting bigger over time. I think you can only shrink it by starting a new project. But not 100% sure.

You might consider having a "master" project, export puppets always from that project, then import into other projects you create for animation purposes (not rigging the puppet). That way all your master assets are still in the one project.

I worry about bugs in CH or a disk crash etc that may corrupt your master project - in which case you would lose everything! Exporting your puppets (and saving the .puppet files away somewhere safe) would reduce this risk.

[Kristi Hex]

Thank you 🙂
I was suspecting the same.  Does the entire project load into RAM each time?  If even some of it does, then that's resources I could be using.  It's taking quite a bit of time to do simple tasks at this point (like enabling a layer).

I'll try importing the puppet into its own project and see if there's a difference.
(I appreciate the response, thank you)

[Kristi Hex]

It seems to have helped.  Though there is still some delay, it isn't as bad as it was.

Thanks again.