Vincent

@Juan Pablo Bouza: Ho Thank you ! Yeah I know you will do a tutorial, I read that in previous comment but I couldn't resist to share this in case someone has the same issue. I just check and the floor controllers are in the layer EXTRAS. Next time i will search a little harder x]

Agent 327 looks great so far ! can't wait to see the final result! Good luck with this project.

@Jeffrey H: oh man, finally!, thanks!, i tested that so many times but from the hand hinge, because it didnt make sense to me that it was in the arm controls.

@Luciano Muñoz: I agree, it's not very intuitive. I'm used to standard Maya naming conventions with labeling like "space switch" or "isolate," both of which are more descriptive than "hinge," particularly because hinging is a function in multiple places for different purposes. Perhaps I'll submit a pull request relabeling these switches.

@Jeffrey H @Luciano Muñoz:

What is this I hear?? Are you criticizing my beautiful GUI??????

OK, I'll take note of who you guys are, starting my black list righ here :p

Haha, ok, I"ll see if I can change those labels soon :)

@Juan Pablo Bouza: we're just rambling, but thanks for listening, it's just most rigs Space Switch are usully in their IK hands instead of the arms, and it's very hard to figure out how to use this rig without the GUI btw.

And though I'm having a bit of a hard time getting used to the BlenRig i love that is so complete and powerful, though I'd try and have a lighter version, most of the people i know including myself cant make any of the rigs run at 24fps on the view port at their lowest resolution,, and the slowest computer I have is a mac i7 2770 all quad cores and all with at least 8gb of ram, so some optimization would be very much appreciated =)

@None None:

The optimization is not to be done in the rig, but with the deformation technique, that's why if you use mesh deform, you should always create a proxy version of the character. I'll cover that in one of the last chapters of the tutorials I'm publishing.

**@Luciano Muñoz: **

Are you saying the low resolution version of vincen doesn't reach 24 fps? I've got an i7 3930k here and it runs at 40 fps. But I'm talking about the vincent_low model, not the one you render. I'm running linux here, I know that windows goes a bit slower with animation playback, and I don't know about mac. The rigging panel has an optimization tab, have you tried unchecking some of the checkboxes?

The thing with optimizating the rig, is that there is nothing I can do to optimize it actually, all the body mechanics are not really complex to process. The most complex part there is, is the facial rig, which actually has more bones than the body itself, hehe, but there's no way to optimize that, except deleting the whole facial rig. So, I could do a preset without facial rig and people could do their own facial stuff with shapekeys.

How many fps do you get by seeing just the Armature layer? And, you are not using the new depsgraph, are you? Cause currently that is really slow.

@Juan Pablo Bouza: if low resolution means: "Model_Res: 0" then yes, unless there is a proxy version or something that i dont know how to activate.

In the RIG optimizations panel i have everything unticked.

I did turn on the new depsgraph and it dramatically went down from 19-21 fps to 9-10 fps, i thought it should be faster right?...

and latstly the only armature layer i have on is the Body layer

I find the new depsgraph does drop speed initially, but if you up the subdivision levels it doesn't drop per level like it does in the old graph. In the rig file, the proxy mesh is on layer 2. If you link the rig, you'll link the group "vincent_low" into the new scene.

For additional performance, I enable opensubdiv on all the subsurf modifiers and bring them to the top of the stack. This only works if you have subdivision set to 1 or more, otherwise subsurf doesn't compute. There are various tweaks in the user prefs that affect drawing, but they don't give you enough of a speed boost to bother with them.

JP is right in regards to optimizations; the rig is not the issue; it's the deformations. I get about 60 FPS with just the rig, 35 with the proxy mesh, 24 on the high-res mesh without subdivisions, 9 with one level. In the new depsgraph I get ~26 FPS on just the rig, 19 with the proxy mesh, and ~15 with the high-res mesh without subdivisions.

@Luciano Muñoz:

Yes, this that Jeffrey says is what I meant, there is a proxy model in the second layer of vincent's scene, and when you link the character you can link both groups, vincent_high and vincent_low, so that you can switch from high to low in order to work with a decent speed.

About the new depsgraph, forget about it for now. Good news is that speeding up the depsgraph might be one of the concerns of the agent project. So I also hope BlenRig can run as fast as with the old one after that!

@Juan Pablo Bouza: yeah after you mentioned all of this i figured out about the rig in the other layer, much better speeds indeed. Thank you guys so much.

I got a question or more like a suggestion, since the rig picker is so complex for a beginner is very hard to understand, and also while the layers are off picking the controllers that are in them doesn't let you make a thing. wouldn't it be nice that having a layer hidden means either controller grayed out or just not visible, it would unclutter the picker UI if you're animating with less panels on. Lastly i would add the pivot controllers and the necks 2-3 extra and even the spine ik ones to an other layer that could be as a part of body 2, or body tweaks, again to unclutter the main control system =) all in all, this is really fantastic work man!

@Juan Pablo Bouza: Oh well that's handy, I just know it was a trick from using the CG Cookie rig, actually after playing with the Blendrig for a couple of hours there is a ton of stuff going on and i have no idea what I'm doing! I should probably watch some videos or something. Do any of the Blendrig videos yet cover using it?

I actually stopped getting 24 FPS as soon as I started animating so I shouldn't have said anything, if I knew how to switch between the high poly and low poly proxy and how to get the arm IK to stay in the same place when i rotate the body I think I would be set. I have Vincent linked into my scene just as the high poly since I am not sure how to switch between the two meshes and the arms seem to be automatically be IK controlled but when you rotate his body his hands follow with him instead of staying in place on top of this cubicle wall. Maybe I am already screwed since I started animating with the high poly Vincent?

Anyway I am just kind of rambling on but this is a cool rig if I could figure out what I'm doing, I've got an I7 4770k and a GTX 970 running Windows 8.1

hey @Corey Lowe:

Yes, once I finish with the rigging tutorials, the first thing I'll do is a tutorial about controls.

For now, you can watch these two videos from Cosmos Laundromat, which use a very similar rig:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLzCSzfQe8A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILguM8P5r0k

About linking, I think you should delete the current vincent and the rig, or start with a new scene, and relink both groups, _high and _low. If you start from a new scene, you could append the action that contains your animation and assign it again to the armature. Then, select the high group and do the make proxy thing, and select the blenrig armature. You'll see that the armture will control both versions of vincent. Then you have two options, you can put the low version in one layer and the high in another one, or you can delete the low version, and then from the Object panel - duplication (blender standard properties panels), you'll find a group field from where you can choose low or high, when you select the mesh of vincent.

About the IK, you're looking for the arm HINGE option, it's one of the sliders besides the arm in the body picker.

Anyway, yes, I'll cover all these things in the tutorials :)

@Andy Goralczyk: Awesome, that's great! Thank you!

Hello, @jpbouza:

Thank you for your response, but sadly it didn't help. As far as I know, mesh didn't move. I suppose it is just a bug. I managed to find a solution by appending all of the objects in the file to another file, linking Vincent again and applying his animation (action) from previous file. It solved the problem as Vincent is back to normal.

Best regards :)

@Pablo Vazquez: Thanks so much. Credit will be given.