Mechanical rig for offline rendering, performance optimisation, non-joint based?

[Anonymous]

Hello Maya community, curious if someone of you has the technical background knowledge to answer this.
I'm currently working on a rather big personal project of a futuristic sniper rifle with a lot of moving parts. Workflow is that I will both render the highpoly in some raytracer, probably Redshift, and create a pbr textured game model, both versions animated, So I need a game ready rig anyway.

The thing is the highpoly will have a shedload of polys, probably around 15-20 million, and I wonder whats better for performance.
I could "rig" the hihpoly within maya just with groups with a proper hierarchy and the right pivots, so no skin clusters necessary (all parts are completely mechanical, nothing has to deform in any organic way). But since I need a joint based game rig anyway with the same setup as the group-"rig" I could only create the game rig and skin the highpoly to it like the lowpoly.

My thoughts are now that I believe that the highpoly animation would perform faster without skin clusters from the joints. That it's faster to compute the translation and rotation of groups and their assigned objects than appling the translation and rotation of a joint to its skinned mesh vertecies, right?

Just a technical thought out of curiosity, or is it bad practice to create a non-joint based rig for cinematic animations anyway?
Thanks for the read! Have a nice day everyone! - Martin

[mspeer · Accepted solution]

Hi!

If you only have moving and not deforming parts also using joints would be faster than usual (with correct settings).

An other solution could be to use 2 different animation/rigging systems for those 2 objects.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the reply, a user at polycount commented an super obvious solution, I could test this by just parenting everything to the joints rather than skinning the mesh to the joints and vice versa.

[mspeer]

Hi!

"...parenting everything to the joints..."

Sure, you can do this, because you don't need the deformation.

[J450NP13]

I have done this and used set driven keys then baked the animation.  Using set driven keys allows you to control every mechanical movement pretty easily.