This Maya Deformer Plug-In Replaces Weight Painting with Spline-Based Deformation

CG Software Engineer Matin FalahManesh unveiled Profile Mover, a C++ deformer plug-in for Maya built on the Curvenet rigging technique introduced in Pixar's 2022 SIGGRAPH paper by Fernando de Goes, William Sheffler, and Kurt Fleischer.

The plug-in replaces traditional weight painting and corrective sculpting with a spline-based approach. The approach implies that artists draw curves directly onto the character surface, which then drives the deformation. Since the curves are independent of mesh topology, the same rig can be applied across different meshes without modification.

Profile Mover is not the first time the Pixar approach has reached Maya. An earlier work-in-progress community effort, a custom Pixar-style Curvenet deformer by Pavlo Kotliar, is a curve-based deformer that serves as an additional rig, working alongside the main rig or geometry cache to create secondary deformations. Check out more:

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