Hi! I have to put up front, that I have now 3 weeks rigging-history in Houdini (after 20 years of Maya), so please excuse if I'm not completely precise. I know that there are several different ways of building and adding things to the apex rig-graph (or its sub-components/modules). For example, using an apex component with second input + edit graph, or you unpack the rig and use an edit graph after that (or using a stash) -> repack and pipe this to the next apex component. My question is if it even matters which workaround you're going to use in terms of final rig-performance? So are stash-nodes or direct modifications with unpacked rigs + edit-graphs impacting the speed so that you should use it only for testing things? If I understood this correctly, you can save out the final character to a .bgeo-file. But what exactly contains this .bgeo-file? Is it the whole node-tree starting from the geo-import / skeleton-definition etc to the very last node? Or does this .bgeo holds only all apex-auto rig-components from the first to the last? Or is it something like a "compiled" version of the apex-node-tree-logic?

Hope this makes sense. Thank you!

it doesn't matter which workflow you use to create the data
since the rig doesn't contain any of those SOP nodes, they just create the actual rig nodes under the hood which will become the rig logic

so in the end you will have geo containing various packed folders with mesh, skeleton, rig, etc
rig will be a graph that was created and modified by all the auto rig component nodes
So what affects the performance of the rig is the complexity of the rig logic and of course the usual stuff like deofrmation overhead, etc.

maybe this can clarify more what's going on under the hood
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bjPTvkpNC0 [www.youtube.com]

ut what exactly contains this .bgeo-file? Is it the whole node-tree starting from the geo-import / skeleton-definition etc to the very last node? Or does this .bgeo holds only all apex-auto rig-components from the first to the last? Or is it something like a "compiled" version of the apex-node-tree-logic?

None of these. THe .bgeo file contains what you see in Rig Tree pane.

Thank you very much tamte and kodra. This helps for understanding quite a lot!

Again, this forum is amazingly supportive.