how to disable skin
 

i have this very annoying problem that my character is so slow when i smooth bind the skin that it is not even funny. when i only manipulte the skeleton w/o skin it works in realtime. is there a way to disable skin calculation while i only animate and dont care to see the skin move? i tried to export the skin weights, unbind the skin - and rebind the skin and import skin weights - but that did not want to work correctly. disabling the skeleton deformer from the inputs to the character did not work either - it was still too slow for interactive placement of the bones - infact it did not seam to have any gain in performance.

I usually delete everything's history before binding, to make sure nothing else is being caluculated, except maybe necessary things like Blend Shapes.

ok, i am out of ideas. i removed everything - only left the shape of the body and the skeleton.

before you bind it - all works fine. after smoothbinding there must be an exponentional slower thing :(

the feet mover work ok after binding, so does the hand, but really slow. but once you touch the root bone and rotate it - not working very fast.

here is the file to look at (the skin is not bound in it). if someone finds the reason it is so slow after the default smoothbinding, i would like to know as well.

file is in 4.5

I'm at work, so can't view your file, but it might just be that it's slow just because... the higher resolution model, the slower it'll be to try to move it with it bound.

For my cartoon Mike model, I never rotated joints with the model visible... too slow.

I just did a smooth bind on your mesh, and everything is running in real-time on my Powerbook. How fast is your machine, and what kind of graphics card are you running?

thanks mike for the hint - i got it all fixed. not that the "invisible" helped, i tryed and it did not help at all. but i seen my big big mistake. it was doing fk, when the ik handles were all enabled. i can "rotate" the root now - i just added another ik handle from root to the next spine1.

interesting - i just made the skeleton more complex, and get awarded with real time.

you can have all in realtime - here it has a fit when i rotate the root joint, not using the mover things on hand and feet.

i smoothbound with complete skeleton, closest joint, max influence 5 and drop off rate 4 - the default.

my machine
a tb 1.3 mhz
512 mb sdram
but only a gf2mx400 - softquadroed

i think i should upgrade my machine - will do that when i come to the us :)