>> Is it as simple as building low res stand-ins and offloading? Pretty much... yeah.
Is it a solid, (mostly if not completely) non-deforming thing like a vehicle? If that's the case, you may wanna consider making a null hierarchy where each null contains a selection of meshes that "move as one". For example, a regular solid car's rig might be: car body, left/right front/back wheel rotation and left/right front/back wheel brakes, so 9 nulls. Animating those 9 nulls will be way lighter than dealing with hundreds or thousands of parts deforming or individually constrained to whatever, plus it's less data for the Delta property to keep track of. By the way, I like to call these nulls "segment nulls". If you're dealing with mentalray or Arnold, both have the standins concept that works quite well, especially in Arnold. (Maybe XSI Vray does it too, not sure.) You'll want a standin per "segment" and if you name your standins the same as your segment nulls in a separate resolution, then it's very easy to animate a very light rig that is high-res compatible. Also makes it a piece of cake to republish update geo and shading by simply reexporting the standin files. At work we had stupid mesh density in Pacific Rim's control pod "stilts" and this *segmented workflow *of standin nulls constrained to a rig worked out great. ;) On Mon, Dec 23, 2013 at 11:09 AM, Paul Griswold < pgrisw...@fusiondigitalproductions.com> wrote: > I don't work a lot with reference models, but I am now. The mesh is dense > and has a lot of parts to deal with. When the mesh is local, Softimage > handles it fine. But when it's reference, just moving through the timeline > takes 8-10 seconds per frame. Even in Bounding Box mode, Softimage grinds > to a halt. > > Can anyone point me to any FAQs or guidelines on working with heavy > reference models? > > Is it as simple as building low res stand-ins and offloading? > > Thanks & Merry Christmas! > > -Paul > > ᐧ >
