Hello!
Many would agree that slow rig can make animator’s life a hell and if there are several such rigs in a scene there is a risk of failing the task completion.
I use Maya professionally at work, sometimes we deal with a dozen of very complex rigs in one scene and Maya’s playback is still around realtime. This kind of performance can easily go down to one frame per second if a rig was done without care and optimization. One huge optimization that can be applied to all rigs is to avoid expressions at all costs! You may wonder why? The thing is that to perform an expression the software needs first to compile the human written code to the machine code and than launch the execution process and that has to be performed every frame for every expression that is in a scene. Meanwhile the use of nodes,parenting,direct connections,constraints or set driven keys don’t require any compilation, they just work fast an stable.
In Blender there is no way to connect attributes or pipe the attributes through nodes that can modify the value of the incoming attribute and output completely different value, there is no way to drive one f-curve with a f-curve of another object. The only ways that are available are constraints and expressions. Constraints are pretty much limited thing by itself and expressions is really powerful way to script any desired behavior, but do they have the same downsides of Maya and XSI??? How fast and stable can be Blender with complex productions rigs that are based on expressions?
In Blender what you call “expressions” are carried out with Driver. Look in to that. To increase performance, Blender has layering system that control displays. For fast response one needs to turn off details not needed for real time animation.
Yes, but this is not what I was asking. My questions is:
How fast and stable can be Blender with complex productions rigs that are based on expressions (Drivers)?