Add Mannequins

DAZ characters often have quite a large polygon count, which may affect viewport speed. This is especially true if you try to animate scenes with several characters or you use an old computer. Replacing meshes with low-poly versions helps to some extent, but the viewport can still be painfully slow. It appears that the main obstacle is deforming meshes with an armature modifier and vertex groups.

This is where mannequins come in. A mannequin is a collection of meshes that don't have armature modifiers, but instead are parented directly to bones. Tests indicate that posing with mannequins is much faster than with normal characters. If the meshes and the mannequin belong to different collections, the meshes can be excluded from the scene during posing, which vastly improves viewport performance.

The suggested workflow is thus:

• Exclude the meshes from the scene.
• Animate your scene with mannequins.
• Include the meshes and exclude the mannequin.
• Fine-tune the poses with the proper meshes in place.
• Render.

Select the meshes (not the armature) that you want to make a mannequin for, and press Add Mannequin.

The options are

• Head Type. How to split up the head into chunks. This is most relevant for Genesis 3 and Genesis 8 rigs, where the head has a face rig with many bones.
  • Solid. Keep the entire head as one mesh.
  • Jaw. Split the head into a head and a jaw mesh. Thus is usually the default.
  • Full. Split the head fully. This is usually a bad idea for characters with a face rig.
• Add To Collection. Add the new meshes to a collection (group in Blender 2.7x).
• Collection. Name of the collection/group.
• Transfer Normals: Transfer custom normals to mannequin meshes.
• Transfer Vertex Groups: Transfer vertex groups to mannequin meshes.
  • Ignore Bone Groups: Don't transfer bone vertex groups.
  • Threshold: Minimum vertex weight to keep.
• Transfer Vertex Colors: Transfer vertex colors to mannequin meshes.
• Transfer UV Layers: Transfer UV layers to mannequin meshes.

After Add Mannequins has been pressed, there are many new meshes parented under the rig. These meshes are parented to different bones and named rig-name_bone_name.

Because the meshes and the mannequin belong to different collections, we can quickly exclude the meshes from the scene and pose the mannequin. The viewport is usually very responsive at this point, because no vertex groups have to be evaluated.

When we are happy with the pose, we exclude the mannequin and bring back the proper meshes f or rendering. Usually the pose has to be tweaked a little at this point.