Surface animation and bone motion

[Dave]

Thanks Farshizzo - no, not done vertex shading but will learn or find someone that has. No problem animating bones for actions not built in and biohead ok. But another biohead question/problem. We are running quite a large model (of a church) with a talking figure in front on a dual 2.66 processor with a GEForce 7600. The model is split into several sections (eg gable, nave, aisle). When we run with just the church model or the church with a non talking avatar the CPU load is around 5-30%. When we just have the talking head avatar with no church - again around 10%. However, as soon as we put the two together the CPU load shoots up - with just the gable and avatar - 60%, gable+Nave+avatar - 80%, gable+nave+aisle+avatar - 90%+. Any extra church components and the CPU goes to 100%. That it is the biohead seems clear - if we move the viewpoint, as soon as the biohead disappears from the field of view (the body and legs can still be in) the CPU load drops to around 10% again. Is there a reason why having the biohead in conjunction with the models causes such a CPU load (maybe calculating what is hidden by the biohead and shouldn't be rendered) and is there a solution (apart from a faster processor). Thanks.