Together with Nathan, I’ve been testing a prototype (‘Spring’) shapekey based rig and trying to benchmark it by:
- duplicating the rig (locally) with having separate animation actions, after 20 duplicates (4000 shapekeys in total) the viewport on my machine would still run it above 24 fps.
- regarding data size, 1 facial rig with bones and 200 (driven) shapekeys can be saved to a 31mb blendfile.
- manipulating shapekeys for animation in the viewport stays very responsive.
Nathan concluded that performance and filesize are not an issue for low poly count facial rigging and animation based on the testing we did together.
Talking to @mont29 , the benchmark will be the character from Charge (Einar) with a relatively high polycount and setting up a shapekey system that would resemble a production ready facial rig. Found here However, it won’t include other factors like body rig, hair, extra deformers etc in order to isolate performance measurements for shapekeys.
This benchmark would give us clarity whether we might be trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist and with the precious developers time, there are other matters that need their brains.
I’m also going to make a workflow design plan for the character facial rigging workflow (with consult of Nathan and Met) that hopefully gives a clear view of what improvements are required to accomodate this regarding shapekey management, data optimization and additional tooling.