Changing Geometry After Rigging

[gregs]

It looks like certain changes I make to my geometry (the instance I'm thinking of is the sculpt polygons tool) are stored on the tweak node. This leads to a couple of questions:

As I add more and more changes, does the tweak node get bigger and bigger in any way that will slow down performance? If it does, should I periodically bake it out? And if so, am I right in thinking that the correct way to do this would be to delete history on the geometry's intermediate object?

Also, if I knew in advance that I was going to use deformers to make non-animation type changes to a rigged model, is there a workflow that would make it possible/easy to bake these deformers after I've done the modelling? To sort of "set them aside" from the clusters, blendshapes etc. that are on the model for animation purposes?

My goal is to have a small number of rigs that I can modify into various characters as needs arise, and yet not to have the deformers pile up and slow down the calculation times.

Thanks in advance for taking the time to answer. I realize there are a number of questions here -- any help you can give is appreciated.

Greg

PS: Still on my wish list is a way to select a deformer from the input list and just plain bake the sucker out. The "Delete Non-Deformer-History" feature is great, but I would love to be able to lock down my non-animation type deformer nodes. If this feature has been added, please tell me, and I'll buy you a new car.*

Thanks again.

*Offer not to be taken seriously.

[joojaa]

QUOTE(GregS @ 09/12/05, 06:43 PM)
As I add more and more changes, does the tweak node get bigger and bigger in any way that will slow down performance?  If it does, should I periodically bake it out? And if so, am I right in thinking that the correct way to do this would be to delete history on the geometry's intermediate object?
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Not realy but it does add slight overhea (and its size stops growing after youve paintted all the points), the realproblem is that the teweaks are LOCAL so if your object moves before the tweak it will not likely respond the way you want it to. That said its realy easy to take the tweak array and pass it on to the original shape before the deformers, infact modlmedding on top of the object in any way except changing tropology workds mostly well thisway as long as you cleanup the nodes afterwards and mve the final shape atrray to the beginning of the chain.

On a second note maya 7 however has a even better way of doing this and its to copy the original shape modify it to your hearts content or atleast for skinned doeformers, and blendshapes uisng the new Substitute geometry, Topology propagation functions.

Anyawy skin and blend is the most problematic and all other maps can prettymuch be handled like the substitute geometry (a trick to circumvent the values asif they were weights on dunny objects and them move the arrays SHOULD WORK, havent tested yet)

[gregs]

Well I've just spent some time with the substitute geometry deal, and it looks at though it's a big, big, BIG step in the right direction. This goes a long way towards solving almost the biggest problem I've had with Maya.

In a way, (and now I'm editorializing) I think it might go a ways towards solving one of the big problems in the industry. So many times in the big CG animated features, you can see where the producers ran out of time in that the secondary characters are so obviously a level below the main ones in quality. This substitue geometry thing should allow for quick sculptling of secondary characters that, in fact, have some character.

There were a few little bugs. The newly skinned figure didn't have a material, so it was invisible when it was first created. It scared me but no problem. The weights weren't perfectly xferred that I could see, a few vertices shot off into space, and this is with only very minor changes made to the substituted geometry. Not to mention that the funky vertices were way far away from the area I'd changed -- I modified the head and the hands got screwed up. I'm thinking that saving out the skinweights first would get around this.

But still, this is really a good thing.

Thanks so much, Joojaa, as always.

Greg