Has anyone experienced blend shapes lagging when they move the sliders? My current rig I am working on seems to have trouble calculating blend shapes. The problem seems to be coming from combining geometry after I finished creating my blend shapes. Has anybody else experienced this problem?
The details:
For my blend shapes I extracted the head geometry so I could duplicate just the head. I also had to duplicate my upper and lower teeth so they could be included in the blend shapes (All of this geometry was combined). Now when I reconnected the head to the body and re-parented the lower teeth to the jaw, everything works fine but Maya is really slowing down when I move the blend shapes slider. This did not happen before I recombined everything. I have isolated the problem to be from recombining the geometry. Is there a way to fix this?
what do you mean, “All this geometry was combined”. If I’m not mistaken you shouldn’t be combining any blendshape geometry. The way I would do it is remove the head, duplicate for blendshapes. create your blendshapes and target them back on the first duplicate and then use some kind of system to deform the head on the body using the duplicated head. I have used a wrap deformer before and I know others have built systems to similar effects.
You can’t use a blendshape to deform the body head because you changed the geometry (Vert ordering and such) when you cut the head off.
What I meant was that the upper teeth and lower teeth were combined with the entire body geometry.
My base mesh is set up like this:
Body
Upper teeth
Lower teeth
I extracted the head along with the teeth because I needed to include them in my blendshapes
I was then left with this:
Main body
Head
Upper teeth
Lower teeth
When I finished my blend shapes I had to connect the head back to the body so Maya would view it all as one piece and merge the vertices so I wasn’t left with a seam.
My problem stemmed from combining and seperating geometry too many times after the blend shapes were made. As far as I can tell, Maya had to make a bunch of unnecessary calculations trying to figure out what piece of geometry the blend shapes were connected to. I solved the problem by going back to a previous version of my file and limiting the amount of times I combined and separated the geometry. All was smooth from there!