SLOOOOOW Spline IK

[LFShade]

SplineIK is notoriously slow. That is, it's usually fast enough when left on its own, but it slows way down as soon as you hook it up to the rest of the rig. The best way I've found to get optimum speed and still have splineIK is to use a 3-knot spline; the less knots/control points, the faster it tends to be.

RH

[Chaos Maximus]

are there any other possibilities for a charachter such as this. i need good controol over the neck. thanks

[tubby]

I'm dealing with a similar issue with a character that has a long neck like yours. I initially used spline ik but after dealing with files that dragged and were unstable I just chose to do the animation FK with an orientation constraint on the head bone to give it smoother movement on the head. It's a pain in the ass but its better then dealing with the headaches I encountered using spline ik.

[Chaos Maximus]

hey tubby, would you mind giveing me a little more info about what u did. This is my first character rig, and im a little annoyed about hte fact that the spline thing seem so bonkers.

i certianly am having trouble with it, the one in the tutorial seems to work fine, except it will let the spine strech indefinatly. but it runs fast , i dont know why.

my biggest question is how did you rig up your character (im assuming the purple guy in your icon) did the back and the neck rig as different things? im a little confused, i probably should have started iwth a biped, but it has somthing of a tail, im wondering about how all this connects. what did you do, or do you know of any tutorials which talk about these issues?

thanks

[tubby]

hey Chaos Maximus ! My character isn't the best example of rigs to use. It's basically IK for the legs and FK for the rest of the body and limbs. I had an earlier rig that had an spline ik on the spine, with a controller on the top and a controller on the bottom of the spine(the same rig as in the tutorial in the program) I treated the neck and spine seperately, and had another spline ik running up the neck to the the bone right before the head. Then put an orientation constraint on the head and a dummy to control it. After all this I realized that the spline ik really makes it easier to get smooth movement but it also is restrictive and wont always let you get the pose you want and trying to control the movement of it is a pain. The file dragged, would give me crazy script errors and would freeze the program. To me it was a pain in the ass, but a lot of people like it and probably don't experience the same problems I did. I usually leave the tail FK. I usaully just put in its poses and fix up its animation after the rest of the body is close to complete. With the tail being fk you can easily just offset the keys down the bone chain and get nice movements.
I hope I answered some of your questions, the tutorials in max are pretty helpful , I really haven't read many others probably because rigging scares me.:)

[urk10]

Chaos,you could try hiding your mesh and animating the bones instead?

or try this:


http://www.discreet.com/support/max/faq/answer.php3?prod=dddstudio&id=1356

or

http://www.discreet.com/support/max/faq/answer.php3?prod=dddstudio&id=425


Hope this help

[Chaos Maximus]

thanks SO much Irk.

i was following the tuts that came with max, and had 11k frames in the sceene, just so wireing atributes would work easily later. anyway it works now, THANKS soo much. i nolonger dread working with my character, whcih im still in the rigging phase.

thanks agian. chaos

[JennDowns]

From what I understand there was some sort of bug in the spline ik system. I only discovered this through some heavy searching in the max 5 archives. I'm wondering if this has been resolved with max 6? Has anyone tried it yet?

[urk10]

Originally posted by JennDowns
From what I understand there was some sort of bug in the spline ik system. I only discovered this through some heavy searching in the max 5 archives. I'm wondering if this has been resolved with max 6? Has anyone tried it yet?

It's not resolved :(

I've downloaded the demo and it the same thing.

:thumbsdow

[LFShade]

I just want to add a note on parameter wiring. Since wire, script, and expression controllers only work over the range they are expressly set for (the default being the range at the time of creation), it has become common practice to set the timerange to a large number of frames to ensure that wire controllers will continue to work throughout an animation. This is not the best approach, though, since these controllers always need to be evaluated for their entire range, which is expensive in terms of calculation time. It is a better idea to set the wire controller ranges for only a hundred or so frames at a time while animating, which will result in better speed (at least in playback). Before final rendering or previews you can then set the ranges to the full length of the animation. If you're not sure how to set the controller ranges, or you just want to make it easier to set a lot of them at once, here is a script that will help (http://www.tdp.nu/ofer/MaxScripts/setWireRanges/setWireRanges-v1_2.ms). The script was written by Ofer Zelichover.


RH

[jum'bok]

yay! this thread explains everything that was going wrong for me last week (http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=100629)

it's really shitty that the tutorials that come with max would have you follow a method that's guaranteed to not work :annoyed:

woo i'm really excited to actually finish my first rig now, i had to give up on spline ik and use fk for the spine before since i was on a deadline.

total luck that i checked the forum today, i'm glad i did.
:love:

[Cullen]

I had this problem at the begining of the year.
I have this character with tenticles on his head. looks great with spline ik... but is damb slow to work with, especially when further away from frame zero on the time line.

I tried zillions of things. tried writing scripts to turn spring controlers on and off. But my splines went straight up on z axis. I tried.... well... zillions of things.

I ended up unlinking my ik system. Hiding the mesh which was skinned to this system. Animating my character. Aligning the ik syestem back to where it should be (which took about 40minutes.) Linking it to where it should be linked to (another 40minutes). Forgot to turn auto save off (another 40 minutes) Making a preview (super quick-i wonder why). Submiting to the render farm (another 40minutes). Saving the file (another 40 minutes)

I am soo glad I had another computer to work on while spline ik was in control of the computer.

PS-For me it wasn't spline ik that was slow... it was the spring controlers on spline ik.

[urk10]

Does anyone know if it's the same with Maya?

'Cause I was thinking upgrading to Max6 but after encountering this problem I'm not sure if I should.I mean,why did they put Ik in at the first place if it's not working?
That's not really pro

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