Viewport performance for animation playback - Tips?

[mattmos]

Are you freezing off your polygon reduction operator? If you're not then that's what's responsible for killing your rig interaction speed. If the high res mesh is hidden it won't be being calculated.

The way i see people deal with it normally is to duplicate the high res mesh as you have done, an either poly reduce it or just freeze it, then break it into sections (select forearm, extract to new mesh etc) and create chunks for each deformer, which are then parented to the deformer rather than enveloped.

[sonictk]

Are you freezing off your polygon reduction operator? If you're not then that's what's responsible for killing your rig interaction speed. If the high res mesh is hidden it won't be being calculated.

The way i see people deal with it normally is to duplicate the high res mesh as you have done, an either poly reduce it or just freeze it, then break it into sections (select forearm, extract to new mesh etc) and create chunks for each deformer, which are then parented to the deformer rather than enveloped.

You're right, I'm an idiot. That was what was happening. I keep forgetting the stupidest things.

What you can do is duplicate the rig with controls so you have one without any polygon mesh attached. Parent simple nurbs geometry onto the second rig like so



Animate the major movement with the second rig and then GATOR it across to the first rig.

Oh yea, I forgot about GATOR. This sounds exactly like what my animation professor told me to do in Maya as well when I was working with high-res stuff I'm just supremely lazy when it comes to having to make a low-res mesh for the sake of being able to animate it though...I want my eyes and fingers visible damnit!

Thanks all! At least now I have a viable solution to create proxy geo easily...helps at least bring the viewport up to ~24FPS or so. I wonder how on earth people animate for 60 FPS stuff within XSI though...

[angus_davidson]

Each year we always say we are going to get a sign made for the students so they remember to Freeze.

What would make a HQV view port meaningful to me is not so much the focus on dynamic lighting and all that other stuff. Rather let us animate at 30fps without having to resort to tricks. Ideally you should be able to animate on your full mesh in RT ;)

[Sil3]

I downloaded the rigs to try them (didn't even knew about the contest) and man... they are almost impossible to animate with... the only one that has some real time feedback is the little monster, the Girl and the Other monster are basically unusable to me.

[Daniel Brassard]

Here is an extract of conversation on the Softimage Mailing List concerning the assets:

Adam Sale
I did the rigs over a couple of weeks between my full time gigs. The meshes came from 3ds max I believe and were a mess when I first got them. Too many pieces, shapes that didn't work in Softimage, scale issues. I pretty much had to take them down to bare mesh and start from scratch. They have not been fully tested as there was no time or animators available to put them through their paces. Still, they should be robust enough.
Originally the meshes had tangent properties on them that were slowing them down something awful, but I had toasted them to increase performance.
The Dave character didn't seem to have issues at the time I uploaded him, though if its something that others notice as well I can have a look.
Jeremie Passerin
Hey Adam,
The Dave character works fine in Wireframe or HiddenLineRemoval. For me it's really just the shaded mode that is slow. It comes with a rainbow shader that I suspect is the cause of the slowdown.
Adam Sale
The rainbow shader, must be the vertex map. That should not be there.
I think when I get a chance; I will have to provide updates to the rigs based on any feedback I received. I can use my blog to do so.
Jeremie Passerin
So yeah, I found out. There is a weightmap called tangent with an operator called TangentOp. When you delete that it's much much faster !
Adam Sale
Those tangent ops are deadly. There is an option you can turn on in the shaded view that allows you to keep the tangents, Under display options, in the shaded mode area, set the vertex color option to 'Never show' ( use material). I think it better to keep the op as it’s needed for the normal map for rendering.
Eric Thivierge
The Gwen foot rolls aren't working and get script errors when trying to select the leg up vectors through the synoptic. Also User_Normals are on all the meshes of her. Remove to speed up the character.
Adam Sale
Hmm. they should be working. I did find an issue at a workplace, where they got disconnected. A mesh error preceded the loss of the foot roll, but I was not able to track down which mesh was the problem. The foot roll was just a link with. so not sure what would have destroyed it.
There are some issues with the characters that I did not catch on my end. As I've poked around, there are some deficiencies I'd like to clean up and update.
A foot roll disconnected on one, a frozen ICE tree on another. Synoptic link are missing here or there. Somehow it slipped through the cracks.
On the Gwen character if I open the scene file, it suggests the mesh on her inner shirt is corrupt, however, if you pull in the .emdl file, from the models folder it works just fine. I distinctly remember saving the scene file first, and then exporting that final as a model, so not sure how the corruption happened.

Maybe some of the info will help!

[sonictk]

Here is an extract of conversation on the Softimage Mailing List concerning the assets:

Adam Sale
I did the rigs over a couple of weeks between my full time gigs. The meshes came from 3ds max I believe and were a mess when I first got them. Too many pieces, shapes that didn't work in Softimage, scale issues. I pretty much had to take them down to bare mesh and start from scratch. They have not been fully tested as there was no time or animators available to put them through their paces. Still, they should be robust enough.
Originally the meshes had tangent properties on them that were slowing them down something awful, but I had toasted them to increase performance.
The Dave character didn't seem to have issues at the time I uploaded him, though if its something that others notice as well I can have a look.
Jeremie Passerin
Hey Adam,
The Dave character works fine in Wireframe or HiddenLineRemoval. For me it's really just the shaded mode that is slow. It comes with a rainbow shader that I suspect is the cause of the slowdown.
Adam Sale
The rainbow shader, must be the vertex map. That should not be there.
I think when I get a chance; I will have to provide updates to the rigs based on any feedback I received. I can use my blog to do so.
Jeremie Passerin
So yeah, I found out. There is a weightmap called tangent with an operator called TangentOp. When you delete that it's much much faster !
Adam Sale
Those tangent ops are deadly. There is an option you can turn on in the shaded view that allows you to keep the tangents, Under display options, in the shaded mode area, set the vertex color option to 'Never show' ( use material). I think it better to keep the op as it’s needed for the normal map for rendering.
Eric Thivierge
The Gwen foot rolls aren't working and get script errors when trying to select the leg up vectors through the synoptic. Also User_Normals are on all the meshes of her. Remove to speed up the character.
Adam Sale
Hmm. they should be working. I did find an issue at a workplace, where they got disconnected. A mesh error preceded the loss of the foot roll, but I was not able to track down which mesh was the problem. The foot roll was just a link with. so not sure what would have destroyed it.
There are some issues with the characters that I did not catch on my end. As I've poked around, there are some deficiencies I'd like to clean up and update.
A foot roll disconnected on one, a frozen ICE tree on another. Synoptic link are missing here or there. Somehow it slipped through the cracks.
On the Gwen character if I open the scene file, it suggests the mesh on her inner shirt is corrupt, however, if you pull in the .emdl file, from the models folder it works just fine. I distinctly remember saving the scene file first, and then exporting that final as a model, so not sure how the corruption happened.

Maybe some of the info will help!

There are a couple more problems with the rig that I documented over on the AREA forums http://area.autodesk.com/forum/autodesk-3d-general/gwen--daves-getaway-contest/rig-issues/ , right now I don't have the time to look through them as I'm still in the final stages of finishing a school project, but in a week or two I'll be working on this contest entry full-time so I'll see if I can figure them out then.

DAVE RIG:

- Dave’s sneer/lowerLip/upperLip controls seem to be broken. (Applying their respective Actions doesn’t seem to do anything)

- Selecting Left FootRoll in the synoptic gives “Error Executing Script File”

- Middle spine controls in the synoptic gives “Error Executing Script File”. Are these meant to be linked to the FK controls?

- daveModel.FKSpineTopHomeSeparateCtrl is not working for rotation in FK mode (When Spine_IK_FK_Control is set to 0 (IK Spine) rotation works)

Since I’m not that experienced with XSI rigging, any assistance that can be offered to fixing these problems would be greatly appreciated!

Doing a low-res proxy of Dave/Gwen/Rascal greatly speeds up playback performance though, so I would strongly advise anyone who wants to have a crack at this to try that. This isn't like the Malcolm rig at all