I have noticed that when animating some riggers choose to cut their meshes into pieces and use that as a kind of proxy mesh for their rigs to animate on. It doesn’t seem to be about lowering the poly count in this case since they just cut up the mesh. I think each piece is then parented to individual bones as a whole. Does anybody know what the purpose is behind this? Is it done to better see the deformation somehow?
Hello! AFAIK, It’s usually done to keep the geometry volumes for the animators to see how their work looks like in real-time while getting rid of the overhead caused by the skeletal deformer, be it skin cluster in Maya, armature modifier in blender, skin modifier in 3dsmax, . It’s also done for the layout animation, but those models usually have less polygons than the production ones.
In addition to @Strangerman’s answer, it’s also noted that if you have direct bone parenting and no deformation, performance tends to be faster. If you’re animating on a slower system or you have a particularly heavy scene, it’s helpful to have this kind of proxy set up so you can preview your animation in realtime without doing any rendering.
Hey sorry, was a bit busy these few days so forgot to reply :(. Thanks for explanation!
Oh didn’t know that, thanks!