Webber Huang’s Deformation Learning Solver offered a Maya based tool that was based on the paper, Smooth Skinning Decomposition with Rigid Bones.
the greatest feature came in this update is the ability of reverse bone animations from mesh sequences
Similar to Hans Godard’s Skinning Converter, the Deformation Learning Solver can convert deformations into skinning weights. The weights can be used to reduce the amount of complexity involved with deformations and storage needed form them.
Deformation Learning Solver was made to convert any deformation approximation to joints. This allows there to be a savings in computing resources and a smaller data footprint.
Recently, Webber has updated the Deformation Learning Solver with the ability to reverse engineer joint and bone animations from mesh sequences.
This can be a really a useful workflow for some game engines that have issues with blend-shape animations. You can easily reverse blend-shape based facial animation or cloth simulations back to joint-based animation.
Deformation Learning Solver 1.5 includes:
- NEW: wbDeltaMush is included
- NEW: reversing bone animation from mesh sequence
- NEW: alternative update with existing bones and weights
- NEW: a editor for sampling any attribute
- UPDATE: parallelize bone transformation updating function, 30~40% faster than before
- minor bugs fixed
Visit Webber Huang’s Technical Blog for more information on the Maya Deformation Learning Solver, which is planned for an eventual release.
