I have a couple of questions about setting up wing flex in Blender and how the bone and skinned mesh count affect performance.
In the SDK 3dsMax is used, so I’m also trying to figure out how the terms transfer over to Blender.
In the WingFlex - Flaps SDK page WingFlex - Flaps, Helpers are used; are these the same as an empty in Blender?
In Max, it seems helpers can be skinned and used as bones. Is this the correct interpretation? In a Blender context, if animating the main flap the same way, would the helpers’ step be skipped and bones used instead?
Are all the Bones in the tree recalculated whenever one moves? If a bone controlling a spoiler was moved, would that cause a recalculation for the bones in the leading edge slats?
I assume all children would need to be recalculated, so if a main wing bone moved, all slat/flap bones children of that main wing bone would need to have their position recalculated, correct?
In theory, is there a big difference in performance between a wing that has 20 bones controlling 500K verts, vs a wing that has 200 bones controlling 500k verts? Is the performance impact of more bones linear?
In 3dsmax and Blender skins are not made the same way.
In 3dsmax there is no distinction between a bone and an empty. An empty become a bone if a mesh is skinned to it.
In Blender, If you need to animate a mesh without having to skin it, you can use an empty as a parent and animate the empty. If you need to have your mesh skinned you will need to create an armature with bones associated to part of your mesh you want to animate and parent your mesh to this armature. In this case, it’s the bones that are animated.
If you have a lot of bones, there will be a performance issue, as you said children will be recalculated whenever a bone moves. You will need to find the correct amount of bones depending on what you need to animate.
Thank for that, my questions were because the following setup didn’t work in the old 2020 exporter, the empty would of needed to be a bone to in order for the second animation to work.
