Well Mayas kind of straightforward. And mayas not weird, its just that maya builds on the notion that a user can cope with more than 10 interactive steps at a time. Which I know is more then people can do, in the beginning but maya copes with this in a way that does it well.
however mayas also not working like most applications most people are used to. Simply beacuse most applivations arent autoring tools that cope with whatever you like. Also most applications dont come with full remote launc suites designed to work on any 3 platforms.
in fact mayas not weird at all if you look at it form a traditional mega computation point of view, this is how all applications used to work, once upon a time and still do in many cases, whan you deal with server side stuff. Certainly much engineered but still.
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it was a simple effective answer born of experience in the same issue, presuming nothing about my own skills or knowledge...
Sure i just pointed out its the same thing as baking because in the true sense of words it is baking (it bakes into a cache not a keyframe, same thing different fromat). However i cant say to use it, because that automatically drops out all the 7.0 and in some cases 8.0 users out there which are quite plenty. (you didnt mention the version), se id rather fix a generc answer than a maya xxx specific one.
Anyway back to the topic:
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As it stands the two eye components had no keys to bake, both sat within a lattice deformer, the eyeball itself also had an aim constraint... there was no keys on the objects to bake, the transforms were handled via the lattice, it seemed logical to me to bake the keys that existed... in this case the animated clusters on the lattice and on the aim constraints... I could find no info on baking transformations in the help and I know everyone here is busy or understandably hasn't the time nor the inclination to hand hold a newbie through what they consider to be a relatively simple operation.
Ok, theres something in this part that is implying something to me. Are you saying you think baking operates on key frames? Well it does not it takes everything including keyframes and turns them into keyframes. So in your case, while cache is perfectly valid its a also probably 10 times heavier then need be.
Anyway how to decide what to bake. Well you could have baked the transformation of the latices too or the points in the laticce (or the points in the object wich is what you did). Next time try to graph your history and think what connection is lagging.
idea is to try to decipher wat point lags and fix it. You fixed is so more power to you. ![]()
But im not interested in quick fixes im interested in you understading. ask for quick fixes but dont exopect them form me. my price is this, and quite frankly i dont stand the other end.
PS. just to add a bit, mayas flexibility comes at a price, the combinations are unlimited so the rig is more a computer programming language than anything else. there will always be possibilities for issues. And secondly mental ray is not native maya code, so the exporter can become blind to certain effects within the update chain, with some of the default options. So not only do you need maya talking trough stuff, you need the translator seeing it too. So in a way mayas justa a unconnected jumble of small modules (very common in academic an unix line of the world)
this is also why mayas hard to teach, because you cant focus on workflow, you need to focus on how it works and then make a workflow. because any tutorial out there will expose you to one of a 100000 ways, ofccourse of those 10000 only 1-10 make sense, howewer often the tutorial is just one not in the 10
