Scott Englert releases his UVBlendShape Deformer for Maya, which will let you create blend shapes that are not based on an object’s topology. Instead, the UVBlendShape Deformer works on meshes that have similar UV layouts.
With applications in rigging, modeling, animation, and simulation, this plugin can save you hours of work.
This means that you can have objects that are completely different in topology, and still be able to create blend shapes from them. As long as all of the objects have similar UV layouts, you can still create and drive blends.
The UVBlendShape Deformer will be handy for transferring blend shapes across different characters, or for mirroring blend shapes across halves that are not symmetrical.
You could also use the UVBlendShape deformer to reapply corrective shapes that you already have, to the same character after a topology change, no matter how severe.
The Maya BlendShape tool can also be used to drive a higher resolution mesh from a lower resolution version, or generate new character combinations from pieces of other characters — In all, and extremely useful tool for the Maya character pipeline.
UVBlendShape Deformer Features
- Supports any number of target meshes with independent topology.
- Applies additively on top of existing deformation on base geometry.
- Target deltas can be scaled independently in X, Y, and Z.
- Paintable per vertex weight maps for each target, deltas, and overall deformation.
- Multithreaded for performance.
- Comes with supporting Python and MEL tools including user interface and shelf.
You may remember Scott Englert’s previous offering for Autodesk Maya, the Push-Pull Constraint. The constraint lets you have one object’s transform push or pull another transform, with a fixed distance between them. The PushPullConstraint was his first Maya plugin, and is still offered as a free download. Check out the Maya Push Pull Constraint page for more information.
UVBlendShape Deformer Pricing
The UVBlendShape Deformer for Maya is being offered at $40 USD for a single user license. This gets you the latest version of the plugin for the selected operating system for all versions of Maya starting at 2015, tools that include a python module and user interface, a custom attribute editor template and shelf, install and uninstall scripts, and complete documentation of deformer, tools, and usage – which are also available online.
Updates to software are free of charge including future releases of Maya.
