thekenny Posted December 14, 2006 Share Posted December 14, 2006 I'm just curious how others are handling things with character rigs in Houdini. If you have fairly serious rig (biped -IkFk switching -10-12 blendshapes kinda thing) and decent level of geometry. (say 10kpts == approx 4kMb of data) Try the following open houdini -s OUTPUT (this will put you in to a clean non cooking mode in the textport type --> memory to get a base figure to work on. install/instantiate a character OTL with all the bones etc. Type memory again in the textport. I'm just curious how much you are using. Based on what we have now.. it is considerably lighter than setups on the wild. (most of the characters are coming in the 80-90Mb range of memory usage) they are probably as light as they are going to get, minus some sops which we know can can be removed. I'm fully aware of all the sopcache commands to help free up RAM from the existing heap. During the wild we worked with SESI to get a lot of the 'assume coordinate' toggles on the deform and blendshapeSOP (inlcude the 'assume MorphSetup) so things are pretty tight under the hood so to speak. If you use a different application, how many characters are your animators used to interacting at one time? Do you have any metrics for their heft you could share? Thanks -k Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
michael Posted December 14, 2006 Share Posted December 14, 2006 additionally... is anyone using multiple rigs? as in - a really basic light rig (no deformation etc) for blocking/poses, then unload that and load in a more detailed rig (deforms, blendshapes etc) for completing the shot? in many ways we're doing everything 'right' and being pretty smart about it, learning from the experience of the wild etc...but there is, at least for me, a lingering feeling that there are things we could be doing better/smarter/faster/lighter that we're just not seeing... it would be great to know just how much character work is being done in Houdini and some insights into different workflows.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
calin_casian Posted December 15, 2006 Share Posted December 15, 2006 I have an animation rig with proxy geometry 20k points. All the geometry is saved with the otl, no references. It uses about 45M. I do have blendshapes and unfortunately I didn't use sopcreateedit so I probably have 15M only in the blendshapes. The animation rig is the final animation rig except the deformation part so it has fk-ik blends and all the other stuff. I probably should mention that it uses a 4 bone fk spine so nothing fancy about that. I added a sin() to the COG so the whole rigs cooks. Here are my stats from performance monitor: -single instance first time (so the bone cache doesn't kick in) average of 28 fps -single instance second time average of 34 fps - 2 characters, the memory doubled as expected so now I'm using 90-100M, average of 21 fps - 3 characters, the memory went to 150M, average of 14 fps I'll let you know the deform stats as soon as I'm done with it. cheers calin additionally...is anyone using multiple rigs? as in - a really basic light rig (no deformation etc) for blocking/poses, then unload that and load in a more detailed rig (deforms, blendshapes etc) for completing the shot? in many ways we're doing everything 'right' and being pretty smart about it, learning from the experience of the wild etc...but there is, at least for me, a lingering feeling that there are things we could be doing better/smarter/faster/lighter that we're just not seeing... it would be great to know just how much character work is being done in Houdini and some insights into different workflows.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
michael Posted December 15, 2006 Share Posted December 15, 2006 is this rig using the included Auto Rig Biped? - or is this something else that you have made? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
calin_casian Posted December 15, 2006 Share Posted December 15, 2006 Yes it's the next version, or actually it uses different types of bodyparts calin Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
michael Posted December 15, 2006 Share Posted December 15, 2006 Yes it's the next version, or actually it uses different types of bodypartscalin you mean instead of a five finger hand you have a 3 fingered hand if that's what the user has selected? etc? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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