Animating Sub-d Character Super Slow

[goldrake]

so i tried blocking the blindData nodes, but unfortunately that didn't work. i also tried setting them to HasNoEffect, but that didn't work either. too bad, because that would have been a quick solution.

in any case, the other solution, connecting the blindData to a new attribute (added to the bodyShapeHistPolyOrig node... i had to add a new attribute for every single blindData node), disconnecting the blindData from the bodyShapeHistPolyOrig node, animating, and then reconnecting prior to rendering DOES WORK! so that's great news. and after writing a quick script to automate things, it's really pretty painless. the only thing is that you need to save and relaunch the file in order for the changes to take effect, but that's not a big deal.

i'm going to keep testing, and if i run into any problems, i'll post back. if you don't hear from me, that means it's working! i hope this workflow can be useful to someone else.

[joojaa]

The reason you dont listen to other peoples suggestions wth 100% seriousness is manyfold. One, theres a problem of idea contamination, humands are meme machines and unfortunately the memes we choose are NOT guaranteed to be best, but rather sometimes it impossible to tell what the appeal is. Unfortuantel this means we share bad habits just as effectively as we share good ones.

So whenever a technique is presented to you you will need to think what the downside is. Every action you do is some sort of optimization some way, but caries negative consequences the other. Its your job to decide what the balance you need is.

Maya internal renderer uses polygons. BUt not all renderer's do this. Indeed the most usefull renderer's dont! They cut up the mesh render time. Wich is the entire point of using real subdivision surfaces. This efficiently means the renderer creates enough polygons at render time based on how the samples are taken. So no extra work is being done, if you now send in a mesh you always send in more data than you need and the computer spends extra time doing export and sorting out this in render time.

Theres a second reason. since the sudiv surface is a mathematical model your renderer has acces to actuall surface derivates, wioch means things like texture filtering is much easier to do. Not to mention thet displacement works based on real data and not offset form a approximation.