Meeting with Tara

I spoke to Tara and she has said that she will try to paint the weights in Maya 8.5 rather than 2011. She explained that it was due to backwards incompatibility and that it is due to the fact that 2011 uses paint weights interactive, where 2008 does not. Tara agreed to try and solve this issue by instead working in Maya 8.5. She then gave us the new rig with the blends connected to the face of our character. When I opened the file I was very glad to see that we had finally received the character with everything connected. The blend shapes were connected to the rest of the character rig with the joints, bones and handles etc. The clothes were also wraped around the character using the wrap deformer, so when the character moves the clothes deform and move with the character body geometry.

For some reason when manipulating the handles in order to move the character's limbs etc this caused Maya to lag. Its is not completely unusable however it is annoying. I tried to solve this issue by decreasing the subdivisions of the mesh and deleting any unwanted components within the scene and deleting history. I discovered however that in doing this the connections between the bones and the character and the blends with the face were removed. Also the painted weight history no longer existed. So I could not use this function. I tried using delete deformer history and there were similar problems. When key framing and animating, I experienced lag and this was not a good way of seeing how your animation is working. I shall have to use the play-blast function instead in order to see how the animation is looking. I was also recommended by Josh to turn of any textures, animate in normal mode rather than smooth preview and turn off the visibility of the clothes. We discovered that the wrap deformer was using up a lot of memory as the computer had to calculate how the clothes were behaving every frame that it was being manipulated. This could be solved by painting the weights of the clothes on the character, however I am told that this would be extremely difficult. The thing is we should have modeled the character and the clothes as a single mesh rather than separate geometry. Due to the fact that Alex and I had very little experience when modeling the character we did not realise this would be an issue. Lesson learned and if only we had known. But what we have is workable and we shall make do with what we have because it is too late for any changes now. Remodeling the character would be out of the question as we would be severely putting us behind schedule and the project would be at risk. Quite frankly I just want to start animating.

We discovered that Josh's suggestion of turning off the textures, the clothes and animating in normal component mode rather than smooth preview did lessen some of the lag issues we were experiencing. We will need to monitor how the clothes are behaving on the character and if the body geometry is permeating the vest geometry. We will have to look at the animation via the playblast function to bypass the laggy playback when viewing the animation through the viewport and timeline.

Tara's Rig. I do like how she colour coded the handles to make the rig more easily understood and navigated.