Deform by cage makes the scene very heavy and produces a large scn file

-----Original Message-----

From: Manny Papamanos

Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2005 3:26 PM

To: 'XSI@Softimage.COM'

Subject: RE: weighting highres mesh off of low res mesh

Thanks for contacting support for this issue. After analyzing your scene, I did manage to get a response from a developer involved with modeling/deformations and he indicated the following...

"This is not a bug per say... a characteristic of the cage deform is that it assigns each highrez points to many lowrez points/triangles, which gives a good quality of deformation.

However in this case it happened that the highrez vertices were assigned to virtually all the lowrez ones (cage). By increasing the "strength" parameter, you are able to decrease a lot the number of points assigned (reducing the "falloff" parameter helps, but not as much)."

With this scene, setting the strength to 10 instead of 4 (default) reduces the cage memory consumption by 75%, and setting the strength to 20 instead of 4 (default) reduces the cage memory consumption by 90%."

I tried his suggestion and he is right, the scene ends up being a respectable 22mb instead of 166mb with this change of value, also the quality of the deform is just the same ;)

Therefore, essentially there is an internal mapping of hirez vertices to literally all of the points in the cage which is inefficient (like setting the envelope's number of bones to all the bones ).

We have however opened a bug for this, in order to avoid such confusion :

- UDEV00178518 Give user a better control over cage memory consumption

Manny Papamanos, Graphics Support Engineer /

SOFTIMAGE/3D/XSI

www.finalgathering.com