Component Modifier

I had a look at trying to re-create something I'd seen a while ago on this demo by Hans Godard, essentially hi-jacking Maya's polyModifiers with a componentList. It's something I've been exploring with a colleague over the last week. Lots of fun to be had. I'm sure there's lots of ways of chaining the modifiers to produce cool effects.

Texture Deformer

I had a look at combining Maya's 2D procedural textures and a custom deformer this week. It turns out you can produce some pretty sweet effects, which I haven't really delved into too much so far since there is a ton of layering and cool things you can do with the procedural textures, including animating them.

I used MFnMesh.anyIntersection to test for collision from rays fired from the points of the deforming mesh, in the direction of the reverse normal of the plane. A colleague pointed me to MDynamicsUtil.evalDynamics2dTexture which gave me the colour information I needed, after using MFnMesh.getUVAtPoint to retrieve the UV values at the collision point returned from MFnMesh.anyIntersection.

All in all, it's pretty damn speedy considering all the calculations it's performing. I added in the blend falloff functionality from the inflate deformer for some additional deformation options.

Inflate Deformer

I was discussing with a colleague recently on how to create a deformer that simulates a foot stepping into snow.

I decided to give it a go myself and the results aren't too bad. Most of the work was already done with the collision deformer I put together previously, the most difficult part was getting the mesh to inflate back to it's default shape. There's a great demo by Marco D'Ambros on this sort of effect.

Pose Reader / Custom Locator

I had a bit of spare time over the holidays so I set myself a side project to work on when I got a spare moment.

I decided to try my luck with a custom locator as I've never built one before but I wanted to make it useful in some way so I went for a pose-reader! Yea..very original I know. But it's always a staple in any riggers toolkit (whether as a plugin or just straight out the box Maya nodes).

This video by Marco Giordano helped me get my maths straight on the subject and I had to read up a bit about spherical co-ordinates to build the cone points at the correct place given some angle.




Unfortunately it's legacy viewport only. The scripted examples (Python API) for custom locators in the devkit seem to be..well...a bit of a mess. So I skipped VP 2.0 support. I'm lazy.