Hi everyone,
I am in the process of developing a custom blendshape deformer for Maya and before proceeding any longer, I would like to ask you a few questions.
Let me first explain that the deformer is to be used with a proprietary artificial intelligence engine for generating procedural animations (highly expressive) within Maya. The engine feeds information into the blendshapes to create expressive facial animation but as expected when using quite a few of them there is significant performance issue.
My idea, is to develop a deformer that has two main optimizations:
[ul]
[li]First, uses the GPU to perform the deformation faster than the built in bledshape
[/li][li]Secondly (still under consideration) uses the CPU to deform multiple blendshapes at the same time - (via multi-threading)
[/li][/ul]
I am trying to figure out whether or not this problem has already been tackled by Maya itself.
Have any of you experienced slowdowns when working with dense faces when trying to do animation due to blendshape performance?
Do you think both optimizations are necessary or a faster deformer that is executed on the GPU would be enough?
I will really appreciate any feedback you can offer from your experience and I welcome any questions you may have regarding this tool.
Iraklis