lag effect and performance

[jim c]

I've made a wings rig with a lag effect. The rig is made up of 12 wings (6 per side), with a curve for each wing. The curve is controlled via 3 nulls for each curve (basically a 3 degree NURBS curve). Each wing has 6 bones which follow the curve as deformers for the geometry. This all works fine.

To add some lag, I used the shelf tool's Lag effect applied to the 3rd control point for each curve (this is the point at the end of the curve). This causes the end point to lag behind and gives a sort of "flapping" effect. Looks nice so far.

However the performance is crap, it really slows the rig down a LOT. The  performance monitor flags a couple of nodes in the CHOP network as being prime offenders but I'm not sure how to tackle this. The shelf Lag effect creates a little network each time, and I've basically got 12 sets of the same thing. Is it possible that I can combine these somehow? Or is there better way to simulate the effect when you have a number of items you want to lag? Both of the red highlighted objects have their "Compute" parm set to Full Transform.

 

[edward]

You could try using a Merge CHOP to merge all the Object CHOPs that you've got together first and then doing a single Lag for all the merged channels. Are those Transform and PreTransform CHOPs doing anything useful? I think the shelf tool creates them just in case.

[jim c]

Thanks Edward. I looked into that and it seems I can bring most of the parts into one node, but at the end of the network that the shelf Lag tool creates, it seems set up to push the data back into one node with using pretransforms or something like that. I'm not sure how that works or how to get it to apply to a whole bunch of different objects. Is the network that the shelf tool generates the only way to use the lag CHOP? Is there a simpler setup?

Thanks again!