You’ll get the best results if you merge the meshes first, cull redundant deformers from the envelope, then do the weight transfer. The part that’s taking so long is you’re creating an M x N x O array of deformers and vertices (436 objects * 161,000 vertices * NbDeformers). That’s a huge envelope weights data table. Moving that around in memory while retaining connections to all the dependencies feeding into the table is what’s dragging it down. Every new object added to the result triggers a refresh cycle causing all the data to be rebuilt from scratch, but with every new object the data gets larger at every step of the process. If working with a handful of objects its not a problem, but your case is quite extreme.
GATOR doesn’t cull deformers from an envelope if it’s not used, nor (sometimes) does it cull a deformer if more than one object use it. For example, if two different objects use the same deformer, attribute transfer will sometimes add that deformer to the resulting envelope twice – once for each input object. I wrote our own set of GATOR tools to handle this problem. It takes some time to work out the logistics and deal with the edge cases, but it’s well worth it in the end. Matt
