Wrap deformers too slow

[gregs]

I may be right out to lunch with this whole idea, but here was my plan...

My character is a one piece mesh, but I want to create a blendshape for just a small part of her. Specifically the mouth region. Since everything I've seen on blendshapes seems to indicate that the entire mesh must be calculated for the morph to work, I thought I would do a duplicate face operation on the region of the mouth, create a wrap deformer from the resulting geometry, and then make blendshapes to sculpt the wrap deformer.

While I was setting it all up, doing my sculpting etc. everything was fine, but as soon as I tried to do anything to my character's skeleton, things really started to drag. Maya was taking upwards of 30 to 45 seconds to simply rotate a joint.

My figure is a polygonal mesh, and it's really not that dense, or anything.

Is my entire plan not going to work, or is there a way to streamline things so Maya isn't doing a bunch of (what seems to me) superfluous calculating?

Or, are wrap deformers just a math heavy operation when combined with a skeleton?

Or maybe there's another way to do what I'm trying to do -- create blendshapes that don't have to calculate the entire mesh? I was doing this to speed things up afterall. It seems wasteful to have a blendshape of the entire figure when I just want to make phonemes.

Thanks if you can help.

Greg

[gmask]

You are wrong about blendshapes.. you can in fact create blendshapes that only use the neccessary vertices by using sets. read more here then ask questions.

As for wrap deformers.. they are slow and math intensive.. you woudl would never aniamte with the effect enabled but rather animate the wrap object then turn ont he effect and see whatt he results are. However for what you are trying to do blendahspes are simplymuch better if done correctly.

[gregs]

Well, that seems to be working. I can't tell if I'm only deforming the sets or if things are happening to the whole surface, but the scene isn't bogging down too badly, or anything. Thanks gmask.

Now my question is, can I not delete a target from the blendShape node once the geometry responsible for it is no longer in the scene? (I think I recall seeing somewhere that that's the case... seems kinda silly though.)

Thanks again. I'm having a riot combining sliders! Maya really is the coolest thing going.