Physique Slowdowns

SyaPed

Hey,

I'm using Character Studio to rig a character, but whenever I go into the Physique modifier to try and weight verts I start getting these massive slowdowns after a few seconds. Which makes it practically impossible to get anything done.

This happened with a previous model that was already textured and for some reason when I turned off the 'Match Bitmap as Closely as Possible' option in viewport configuration, I stopped getting the slowdows. However the model I'm doing now has no textures on it and messing around with those options isn't fixing anything.

It feels like I don't have enough memory or something. But I don't see how that could be it, the model is only around 3000 polys and I've got 1gig of ram...

Anyone have an idea whats causing these slowdowns? It's driving me nuts and I cant get any work done

Eric Chadwick

Not what you wanna hear, but how about switching to Skin? Much faster workflow to be had...

Delaney King

Switch to skin. Physique is no longer supported or cared about. Infact we often tie it to a chair at parties and goad it with food.

Skin is much, much faster... but if you have to suffer physique for engine sake (slap your programmers and get them to write a decent exporter)try turning off a lot of the blending functions such as tendons that your not using.

Then say bugger it all and switch to skin.

Sean McBride

I have to third whats being said here... if you can switch to skin. I reciently did and it's really not that hard of a jump. Plus the ability to paint weights is... oh my god... compared to physique.

Also skin dosn't slow down like physique does... its old technology!

Delaney King

Change heirarchy mid skin session without loosing work. drooooool.

and yeah, paint weights :0

thomasp

sounds like your slowdowns are somehow related to your graphics driver - however physique in general is not fast to work with and depending on your polycount will easily slow down even the latest monster machine to a crawl.

i recently became a skin fanboy as well. and skinwrap is golden. you can convert physique data to skin btw.

ScreaminBubba

*jumps on the skin bandwagon* I switched to skin awhile back, it's worth it, highly recommend it also.

Add and remove bones all day long without losing weights as King of Daveness said.

More stable.
More flexible.
More features.

More reasons to switch?

Delaney King

yeah... Two words. Mirror. Weights.

SyaPed

Wow, sounds like i've been seriously missing out...Being able to mess with bones without losing weighting sounds sweet...And mirroring! Now the left limbs wont bend like crap cuz I did the right ones first and was too lazy to pay the same attention on the left ones :P

I'll definately try Skin on my next model

Ruz

yeah I grew to hate physique. never use it now. skin is fairly straighforward and easy to weight

Rick Stirling

The mirror weights - how accurate is it? The reason is that we are building to 1unit=1m, so all the models are very small. Can it handle good mirroring with such a small model?

Rick Stirling

Oh, and in max 7 the skinwrap is stunning. This morning I was asked for a model for a demo. I had the model, but no rig. I pulled in a good weighted model from a few weeks ago, then projected the weighting from the rigged one to the unrigged one. That was it, 15 seconds later I had an acceptable rig. Then I was able to spend 30 minutes cleaning it up with the paint weights, and it was good to go. This isn't a perfect solution, but it did save me 1/2 a days work.

MacD

This might be a bit of a 'duh!' question, but do the UT2k4 and HL2 exporters support skin? Or are they somehow tied into physique? IOW, does it matter how you weight the verts or is the weight information independant of the method used to do the weighting?

Eric Chadwick

does it matter how you weight the verts

Nope, as long as you avoid "fancy" tools like Skin's deformers and Physique's tendons/bulges. I've also heard some exporters don't like Physique's Deformable envelopes, so you have to use Rigid instead.

But at the end of the day, weights are just exported from whatever is stored in the verts themselves. As long as the verts are directly weighted to bones, you're cool (avoid those morph-like deformers and the bulge gizmos).

Hollowmind

Physique is the redheaded stepchild of vertex weighting in Max. Use skin. It's easy to learn and so much better to work with. Especially if you grab Skin or Die 2. Adds even more very useful tools to skin.