When using maya it happends that you have a Facial Rig and a body Rig that needs combining.
this is usually done with a blendshape with live mesh inputs.
In high end production the facial might end up having a lot of deformers (skin, blendshapes, wraps, lattice deformers etc) and this might eat up your performance in the combined rig, partly because not all deformers support the GPU override and putting deformers in serial needs to happen on the CPU.
Temperately turning off the facial rig is then a life saver for animators to do their body mechanics, and later do their facial animation. Swapping rigs is also a option but that takes more resources to maintain, and also slows down the animation process.
Now is the problem:
turning off the blendshape attr or the nodestate does not stop the signal flow in the maya DG evaluation.
this is because the mesh input is live and still needs evaluation. Breaking this connection would increase your performance, but this is very tricky to do on the fly in a referenced environment.
Request:
a node with a switch between static mesh data and mesh input data. one that actually stops the DG eval at some point in your signal chain. this would be super handy to turn of certain parts of a rig and keep them static/increase performance.
Thank You
