After fielding a few questions on his rigging reel, Jørn-Harald Paulsen posts a look at creating a procedural ribbon rig setup in Maya using non linear deformers and nodes.
These ribbons actually evaluate slightly faster than the traditional ribbon-setup
As Jørn notes, many will find this technique old news. However, in the case you have never seen it before, the procedural ribbon rig setup offers a slightly faster evaluation than its more traditional ribbon counterpart. What makes this set up more flexible is that it incorporates nonlinear deformers. This means that you can have the benefits of deformer functionality without a performance hit.
Jørn-Harald Paulsen has also created a script for this routine, which is identical to the techniques used in the tutorial. There is an option to offset twisting on the surface, but other than that the script is parallel, and can be downloaded here: Procedural Ribbon Rig Script Maya. Be sure to check out the tutorial for Creating a Node Based Procedural Ribbon Rig With Maya here.
