[Bf-committers] Shapekeys improvements

Tobias Oelgarte tobias.oelgarte at googlemail.com
Wed Jan 11 13:40:53 CET 2012


Hello,

In my current project i work on a relatively complex mesh thats needs to 
be animated. Since facial expressions are bestly done with shapekeys and 
also some other parts need (corrective) shapekeys for left and right 
side as well, this results in a whole lot of shapekeys. As i was working 
on the keys i noticed that the performance decreased drastically. In 
fact it slows down linearly with any additional shapekey even so it 
affects only one vertex. If i compare that to other modeling software 
like Maya or 3ds it was quite surprising. They were much faster.

I have to assume that blender stores and applies a whole "secondary 
mesh" for every shapekey and that it computes the result by mixing all 
this keys together. This gets really slow, since usually only a tiny 
part of the mesh is actually affected by a shapekey.

For example: You change 100 vertices from the mouth in a shapekey and 
blender stores 10.000 vertices (the whole mesh). Effectively this is an 
overhead of about 99%.

So i may ask if someone is willed to tackle this issue, to only store 
and apply the needed changes?

Best wishes and greetings from
Tobias Oelgarte


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