A deformer that simulates motion blur geometrically. The amount and falloff of the “blur” can be adjusted with keyable attributes.

This shows a deformer that attracts vertices to a nurbs curve using a distance-based falloff. It can be used to create sticking effects like sticky lips. Various attributes can be adjusted and animated such as falloff, distance threshold, magnitude, etc.

This shows an implementation of a Spherical Radial Basis Function node. SRBF is commonly used in lighting calculations like this http://www.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~ttwong/papers/srbf/srbf.html.  I am using SRBF here to track joint position and orientation. This gives me a weight value per target that I can then use to drive corrective shapes. Each target point has its own falloff and twist attributes to adjust the triggering sensitivity.  The rig is my free quadruped rig, Nico, which you can download here:https://www.creativecrash.com/maya/downloads/character-rigs/c/nico.  The download does not include the SRBF node since it requires a plug-in.

More technology demos!

First is a dynamic transform node. The node is applied to various joints and IK handles. The node can also drive arbitrary attributes so they behave dynamically as well.

Next is a custom jiggle deformer. The reasons why I created my own jiggle deformer as opposed to using Maya’s jiggle deformer is because of speed and ease of use. Mine runs a lot faster and is easier to use.

And last is my own wrap deformer. As you can see, mine gives a cleaner result. It also has the ability to rebind vertex associations so if vertices are wrapped to the wrong section of the driving mesh, you can rebind them to be driven by another section of the mesh.

Stay tuned for more!

This is a performance comparison between Maya’s blendshape deformer and my GPU-based blendshape deformer with 1000 targets on a 30,000 vertex mesh. The test is using an Nvidia Geforce 230M video card.

This video shows a skin sliding deformer I wrote for Maya. It’s paintable, multi-threaded, and fast!

I started putting up pages about the Maya API with C++ and Python. I’ll be adding to it more in the future. Check it out here.

I wrote this last week.  It’s a Maya blend shape deformer that runs on the GPU.  The sample shown is a 30,000 vertex mesh with 1000 targets.  It runs 32x faster than Maya’s blendShape node on a Geforce 230M notebook GPU. A 40,000 vertex mesh with 1500 targets ran 40x faster.

Well, it was fun while it lasted…

LOS ANGELES — To further cut costs at its movie studio, The Walt Disney Co. said Friday that it will shut a San Francisco-area facility used to capture the performance of Jim Carrey for his digitally animated character, Scrooge, in “A Christmas Carol.”

The closure of the facility in Marin County, north of San Francisco, will be completed by January and result in the loss of 450 jobs.

Adjusted the shading and rendering of gramps.