When deforming multiple geometries or grouped geo (not combined), you have to create deformers for every shape thus resulting in possibly large amounts of unmanageable deformers which are not complementary when painting or setting weights.
Many deformers are already equipped with the necessary attrs, but do not work correctly under the hood/with the painting tools.
Existing concepts of this idea:
-blendshaping identical groups.
-lattice deformer
-wire deformer
-...
implications:
- possibly multithread deformations within the deformer, for every input/output geo
- abandon component index and work with object id + component index or remap to a single index list
- update the paint tools/component editor
Dev team feedback:
Skin Clusters do not support multiple geometry inputs
Shapes are using the same skin weights as the first shape (only the first will appear in the component editor)
Changing one skin weight affects all the shapes
This is expected behavior with skin clusters
I verified these are behaving as designed. skinCluster works on every output geometry but using the same weights.
About the performance, if shapes for deformation have the same number of components,
it could reduce the amount of weight calculation.
The calculation will be parallelized in components within a shape.
Not parallelized shapes. (The output geometry is calculated step by step. But each component will be parallelized.)
But the performance depends on data and hardware. It would be faster the skin clusters are separated for each shape.
I've also checked the warp deformer node. The wrap is clearly limited to work with a single output geometry. It does not accept multiple shapes as a deformed shape.
implementation examples:
- deforming various (grouped) in/out geo's together, as a single deformation.
- deforming various geo's from a single proxy geo.
- deforming a final output mesh from various proxy geo's.
- deforming paranted curve shapes with a single tranform i.e. hair with a single deformer node
- globally transfer weights.
- painting weights over multiple meshes; i.e. a cut off head can be weighted together with the body mesh for a smooth seamless transition in the neck.
- clean outliner, history
-possibly better performance
-...
Thank you Tristan
