I was starting a new Animation Project and was trying to do some planning ahead of time as to how I will handle the construction of characters and Animation elements…
in the process it came up as to the benefits of using an Armature as opposed to other animation/manipulation methods…
It was mentioned that Armatures can get too heavy bogging down the rendering process…
I had always thought that Armatures were extremely light in the instance of data usage and is why they are used so much in the industry…
but I really don’t have any data to back up my argument…
does anyone have any information on this…?
is it better to avoid Armatures unless absolutely necessary…"
It’s not the armature; it’s more that the armature is deforming geometry. If you can get away with animating by not deforming geometry (or not deforming as much geometry), real-time performance will be better. At rendertime, your rig would need to be quite complex for it to make a dent in render performance relative to the impact of other more significantly processor-intensive elements like vertex count, lighting, and material settings. That’s not to say that armatures can’t be slow… but if you tried to create the same geometry-deforming rig without armatures, it would be equally slow (and in Blender, far less organized on your dopesheet).
@Fweeb
Thanks for the information … I was thinking that Armatures and bones were pretty small compared to most data forms in 3D (not just in blender) part of what I am debating however is the use of deformer bones over weight painting… even at that what I’m probably going to go with is the use of deformer bones that will help me use AutoMajic weighting and cut down on weight painting greatly… but will ultimately be cut from the Rigg at Animation time and Render time…
Weight Painting is a time consuming thing and I have been doing a bunch of Rigging work arounds to try and making it quicker and easier…
the best solution I have found so far is to add extra bones in problem areas of the model mesh then Re-Assign the weight element those bones created during the automatic weight process… to the final bones that will actually get used at animation time…
any suggestions and enlightenment on this process will be appreacheated greatly…