Greetings,

I'm considering substituting the default nulls and bones of my Rigs with self-made HDAs, built with the same purpose. The idea is that I want to add some parameters to the bones and nulls, throughout the rig, and it is easier to maintain if they are HDAs (updating one, updates the rest). I also do a lot of scripting with them, and would like to have the scripts saved with the nodes.

I'm in doubt about the performance, however. For instance, as a test scenario, what would be the performance hit of replacing a bone hierarchy with an identical hierarchy made of HDAs that have the exact same internal structure of the bones?


Thanks in advance.

My attempts have not shown any difference in performance from a hierarchy of default nulls and bones, against a hierarchy of HDAs that do the same as the nulls and bones.

I'm afraid this might be an illusion and the performance will drop when I have a hierarchy large enough.

Test it with the performance monitor, I don´t think it should make any notorius difference. But, you should hide bones and nulls for playback purposes, this will definetely improve performance. This is really slow compared to Maya performance. If you have a skinned character, you can add a stash node after all the capture and paint nodes, this will increase performance.

Thanks for the tips,

I couldn't measure any difference, with the monitor or during usage, so I will assume it is safe to continue with this setup.