I have 2 skinned biped characters in my scene.
It runs at 60 fps with the 2 skin modifiers disabled
It crawls at 8 fps with the skin modifiers enabled.
Skin Modifier: 4 weights per vertices, 10 000 triagles per characters

When I have a cutscene with more characters, it’s a slideshow.

It’s hard to judge the quality of the animation with that framerate.

Is it posssible to code a vertex shader or something?
We tried vertex caching, but it’s slower since the solution is always lost when editing the animation.

Thanks
Alex

If the skin is causing a serious drag on playback it may be better to hide the skin and just observe the bones to see the anim. To see the skin moving at full frame rate use Make Preview from the animation menu.

Yes, that is what we did 10 years ago. I need a real playback as I work, not a rendered preview, and not bones with no facial expression and not showing the real volume of the skin for contacts or limits.

Even Motion builder can playback skinned meshed in real time.

No one knows of a way to keep the skinned mesh on the graphic card with a vertex shader in Max?

Thanks
Alex.

Well it does usually work OK in most cases. Only very dense skin meshes or additional dynamics cause a serious lag. So it depends upon your mesh and your graphics card. If it’s performing badly on a fairly simple setup there may be something wrong in your hardware/driver setup.