Sunday Progress Report (Patreon)

I've been a busy little beaver this week. Lot of code has been written (and rewritten), I'm now running fully modular rig builds and a brand new rigging system. Why is this a good thing? 1. quick iteration, if a system can be improved it no longer requires a complete manual rebuild. 2. prevents crud building up in files, old character were ~250mb, the new, closer to ~50mb. 3. reliability, If [x] breaks in the file, no longer need to spend time transferring hours of work to the last working backup, instead click a button extract the good stuff ready to auto rebuild in another working file. 4. the rigs are ridiculously quick.

Doing this has allowed for a real deep dive on individual part e.g. after some though it turned out the Auto Stretch System could be implemented in a much cleaner way, before it would have meant spending half a week rebuilding each character, now I can change a source file and have an updated rig in a matter of minutes. No seriously! the rig build takes less than 30 seconds and there are a few odds and ends that need doing that are too complicated/buggy to script but take no time at all to do manually (less than 5min per character!) To make life easer I've now coded a suite of scripts to export things from existing rigs in a ways that seamlessly plugs into this new system.

But the most important thing is not how quickly they take to build, it's how they perform.

For comparison, the old version of the rigs with animation for two characters was ~7fps and a whopping 2fps (yes two) if the Auto Stretch System was engaged. Constantly doing playblasts (viewport capture videos) to check on the animation was the only way it was workable (I dread to think how much time I spent waiting for previews to cook whilst making SIEO) 

New rigs get ~20fps without and ~19FPS with the new Auto Stretch System which is more than enough for reviewing in the viewport and if I really need to get exact timings the playblast takes no time at all!

As you can see with these sorts of gains I needed to get the setup and scripts finished ASAP and use these rigs going forward. I would have liked to had at least a preview of the next loop out this week but finished up coding so late today that the animation is currently in a very early stage and not worth showing off, sorry :/   

(I totally forgot to to mention this new system gives me far more control over corrective deformations and has some really neat tricks built in along with an easy to use control interface but I think my ramblings have gone on for far too long already.) 

TL;DR I'll be back next week with some actual content that will be a far nicer experience to make thanks to the above wall of text.