Geodesic Voxel Binding in Maya 2015

Steven Roselle has a look at Geodesic Voxel Binding in Maya 2015. Geodesic Voxel Binding offers a much better and cleaner way of skinning a character in Maya.

Some of the issues with the standard Maya skinning tools, are that they don’t differentiate different volumes within the same mesh. This makes common for the standard skinning affect areas that joints should not have affect over, requiring much more work in painting weights to simply get a base skin on a character.

You may remember an ACM SIGGRAPH 2013 technical paper by Olivier Dionne and Martin de Lasa who offered a fully automatic method for specifying influence weights for closed-form skinning methods.

This was the start of Geodesic Voxel Binding which was designed to be flexible, working with meshes that could contain non-manifold geometry, have intersecting triangles, or be composed of multiple and connected components.