BraveRabbit took it upon himself to compile the old Extract Deltas plugin for Mac OS X Maya 2012 and I think that is just awesome! However he didn’t stop there, BraveRabbit also put together this little video on using the Extract Deltas Plugin for Maya 2012. The plugin can be found here: braverabbit.de/?playground/??p=443

“Quite some time ago I stumbled across a pretty neat plugin for maya that is designed to help with modeling corrective blendshapes. I don’t remember where I found it but it came with an Xcode project and I think the credits go to James Jacobs, whos name is listed inside the code. So, thanks James, wherever you may be, this is just some awesome tool! As it is with these plugins, they usually only run with the maya version they were compiled for and so it was just great to have the Xcode project to be able to compile new versions as new maya releases came along. I am by no means a programmer but since I am a little bit familiar with Xcode by now (Pipeline Render Manager runs pretty smoothly), compiling was not the most difficult task ;)”

Using the extract deltas plugin in maya (osx) from brave rabbit on Vimeo.

This video demonstrates the use of the extract deltas plugin in maya on osx. (Sorry, there is no audio available).

Usage: Pose your model in which a corrective shape should be applied. Select the geometry and run the accompanying icDuplicateSkin.mel. This creates a copy of the skin, removes the intermediate shape and unlocks the translation channels. Use this copy to model your corrective shape. Then select the skin and the copy, make sure the extractDeltas plugin is loaded, and run icExtractDeltas. This will take the bound base mesh and applies the modeled corrections to a copy of it. The result can be used as a corrective blendshape for the actual skin.

The plugin can be found here: braverabbit.de/?playground/??p=443