Here is another sample from my upcoming Maya API video series. In the video I discuss custom locators and go through how to implement them. The video series should be available around January 2012.

This is a demo of a Maya context that I developed as part of my upcoming Maya API instructional video series. It draws curves from a mesh. It could be used to draw hair curves or something along those lines. The video series should be available around January 2012.

For some reason, the Maya artisan tool does not have a move brush so I wrote my own.

I put up a free shape inversion tool available here. cvShapeInverter is a script and deformer that can invert a shape through a deformation chain so the shape can be applied as a front of chain shape. This has the same functionality as Christian Breitling’s correctiveShape plug-in. He stopped providing it after Maya 2008 so I’m providing a Python version that doesn’t need to be compiled.

I made this guy who has some anger issues.

A few former coworkers of mine worked together to put together this little animation using a couple of rigs I made.  Check it out:

• Animation – George Aleco-Sima
• LookDev/Rendering – Brad Falk
• Textures -  Terry Molatore
• Rigs and Creature Model – Chad Vernon
• Matte Paint – Alfonso Villar
• Sound Effects – Kyle Gray
• Technical Wizard -  Geordie Martinez

I’m happy to announce that last month, I accepted an offer to work at Digital Domain‘s new San Francisco office as a Rigging Pipeline TD. This was my first week of work and it looks like it is going to be an amazing opportunity. The small talented team is lead by Academy Award winning VFX Supe, Stephen Rosenbaum.  With solid leadership and a talented team, we should be churning out some great work in the future.  Stay tuned!

This is an update of my sticky lips deformer. In an attempt to make the deformer more automated, I’ve implemented a mode where the vertices stick on contact and then fade off with time. The original mode is based solely on distance and so would stick together even if the mouth was on its way to being closed. The frame stuttering is from the Camtasia settings. The deformer runs in real-time.

A deformer that blends one mesh to another based off of UVs. Mesh topology can differ and you can optionally maintain the initial offset between the two meshes. Uses include transferring existing work onto another mesh. The demo shows transferring shape work from one face to another. The faces have different vertex counts and topologies but share the same UV layout.

A deformer that can drive subsets of a mesh with other meshes. Uses include driving a body with a blendshaped head or driving larger meshes with a heavily rigged subset of the mesh. This can increase performance as the heavy rigging isn’t affecting the larger mesh.