Optimizing Performance

Removing and restoring Rig Tools shapes

Due to issues with how viewport 2.0 handles custom locators, the shapes we use to make Rig Tools joints and bones visible to the user can have a significant impact on viewport draw performance when many are present. This occurs even when the shapes are not visible.

You can choose Contour Rig Tools ► Bones ► Delete All Contour Shape Nodes and Contour Rig Tools ► Bones ► Restore All Contour Shape Nodes from the menu to remove and restore Rig Tools shape nodes as needed. A common workflow is to work with shapes in place when rigging, and remove them when publishing a new version of the rig to animators. Any Rig Tools transforms that are being used as controls should have a NURBs shape added to them so that animators can still select them.

Putting Rig Tools deformation at the bottom of the deformation stack

Like many deformers—wraps and wires for instance—Rig Tools becomes much slower if it must rebind on every cycle. The most common scenario that requires rebinding is the mesh changing in some fashion before the Rig Tools deformer in the deformer stack. For best performance, we recommend putting all other deformers above the Rig Tools deformer. This means using post-deformation rather then pre-deformation blend shapes, for instance.

Reducing the density of the deform field

Rig Tools automatically decides on a density at which to sample the deform field based on the spline’s length and radius. However, in some circumstances—if a spline is perfectly straight and will never bend, for instance—reducing the density of the deform field can improve performance without significantly reducing the quality of deformation. The Longitudinal Density Factor and Radial Samples attributes present on the Joint Socket allow you to adjust the deform field’s density.

Longitudinal Density Factor controls how dense the deform field is down the spline. It defaults to 1, and is a multiplier of the density automatically chosen by rig tools—numbers greater than one create a denser field than the default, while numbers less than one create a less dense field. Radial Samples is not a multiplier, instead directly setting the number of samples taken radially around the spline. It defaults to 8.

These settings should be changed with caution, as values other than the default may produce undesirable deformation.