Cheetah 3D very slow on iMac Pro

I'm running Cheetah 3d 7.5.1 on my iMac Pro with macOS 11.4 and Cheetah is very slow. The activity monitor says Cheetah is using 100% CPU and is not spending a lot of time not responding. My menubar stats app shows only one core being hit at about 50%. Activating parts and saving them is especially slow. Copying items with booleans is excruciatingly slow.

Is anyone else with an iMac Pro having this issue?
 
There have been no changes to my system and my other apps seem to be running normally. Cheetah 3D was upgraded to the current version but that’s pretty much it. I was wanting to try the previous version but I can‘t find a copy of it. It certainly worked well with the previous version but I haven’t used the current one enough to know for sure if it ever worked well beyond some very simple files.
 
I can´t compare with any former versions since I´m on a M1 Mac. Martin added support for up to 28 cores for the MacPro with version 7.4.2 last year - which I believe reflects the new setting in Falcon->Render Threads. Don´t think this has any influence on modeling. Apple changed something to the BigSur clipboard system which leads to deterioration Martin has to work around. Not sure your combo is affected. Maybe ask Martin for a download-link of the former version, when you´re sure it had worked out better for you. Please provide any info you can possibly find for him to track down the issue you´re experiencing. Thanks.
 
I have an iMac Pro, running that version of cheetah and I haven't experienced any of the problems you are describing. I rarely use Cheetah for rendering, but it sounds like that's not your issue. Is it a specific project that you are having problems with? What OS are you running? I only just upgraded to big Sur, from Catalina.
 
Hello mperdue,

As we have no idea how complicated your documents are that are causing “Cheetah to be very slow”, how about posting a screen shot of the Scene info dialog box?

Perhaps it would be helpful for you to start from scratch with an empty document… then keep adding objects and see when things start to slow down.

FWIW, I routinely work with documents that cause C3D to be quite unresponsive, but they are very large documents and what is slow are things that are not helped by multiple processors.

E.g. returning to C3D after modifying and saving a large displacement map in Photoshop… it can take a minute or more for C3D to allow me to get back to work.

E.g. trying to move the camera with keyboard/mouse combination within a scene with 30 million polygons, all of which are visible, is not something that gets good results.

What is in your scenes?

thanks and cheers,
gsb
 
I’ve played around with it today and if I export my file to another format (I’ve tried FBX and DAE) the resulting files work without problems. Of course I lose my Smart Folders and my Boolean objects are converted to editable meshes but the slowness disappears. However, if I just eliminate the Smart Folders and convert the Boolean objects in the original file, the slowness remains. I’m guessing that the problems are somehow related to one or both of these items.

Starting a new file with Smart Folders and boolean Objects also seems to work. Go figure…
 
The file in question is pretty modest. It's a design I'm working on for a model rocket launch rack for the cub scouts.

To give you an idea of how slow it is, if I copy and paste one of the disks on top of the pad (It's simply a tube object) it takes a little more than one minute to complete the paste.
 

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Frank, I'm mystified by that too and looking into it now.

It wouldn't bother me if it was one of my more complex files, like this one...
 

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OK, the object count is probably correct due to the boolean objects used to create the final visible objects. These parts are designed to be output to STL format for 3D printing so there are a lot of items added and subtracted to get the final forms. I leave the boolean modifiers in place so I can easily make changes if the printed parts don't fit the way I designed them to.

After looking at things today I decided to copy each individual boolean object to an empty file to see if I could find one that was slow in a clean database. I finally found one so I recreated it from scratch and replaced the objects in the original file. It looks like that may have corrected my problem.

Thanks for all the help, everyone.
 
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