It's my first time working with subd's, and I was trying to understand what the best way was to rig a subd character so that it's not too slow when I animate it.
Here's what I've done so far:
- modeled a character in polys (about 1800 faces)
- deleted history
- converted to subd's, made some additional modeling modifications (added creases, made model slightly asymmetrical, etc.)
- deleted history
- created my skeleton (56 joints)
- deleted history
- applied the zooCST rig to it
- smooth bound the skeleton to the subd skin
- began painting weights on the subd skin
That's as far as I got. I stopped because I was amazed at how unresponsive my character was when I would move joints around to check my weights. I figured I should ask around before I finished the time-consuming weight painting process to see if others also experienced slow performance with subd characters.
I'm running an Intel Core 2 Quad machine with 4GB of RAM and a Quadro FX card, so I figured the model would be responsive. But with no textures and no other objects in the scene, I'm averaging 1.4 FPS on a simple ball joint rotation playback! Is that normal?
After reading THIS EARLIER POST, I'm thinking that I may have done something wrong or maybe I'm just going about things inefficiently. Then again, I don't entirely understand if I'm too far along to change things... I mean, is it too late? Am I now screwed??
Any help would be appreciated it. As stated above, I deleted all history on the model at various stages, so I'm thinking it's not a history-related problem, but maybe it is?
Thanks.