Brave Rabbit offers a quick guide splitting blend shapes by the weights from a skin cluster in Maya.
The Brave Rabbit (Ingo Clemens) shares something that only a few people know but could offer enormous help to riggers. The quick tip shows how you can use the Weights Server Node (a tool that you can get for free from Brave Rabbit) to split a single blend shape target into multiple regions by skin cluster weights.
While mentioning the weightsServer node. Here's something which only a few people know but can be a huge helper: Splitting a target shape by the weights from a skin cluster. Check it out! #maya3d @AdskMaya pic.twitter.com/1xaZVL8m9P
— brave rabbit (@brave_rabbit) August 8, 2020
“The resulting target shapes are a simple copy of the original full shape, and the weightsServer node transfers the influence based weights to these targets.” The result is a live connection, which means that you can edit the weights and seeing the blend shape result as you work.
Once you delete the weightsServer node, the weights will stay behind on the blend shape node.
WeightServer Node for Maya.
You can get the WeightServer node as part of the free download for Brave Rabbit’s RampWeights tool. Ramp weights node gives you fast access to splitting blend shape targets or weighted deformers along any axis. Both the nodes are also part of the SHAPES plug-in.
Such an obvious thing once you realize it‘s all just numbers, right?
And not to forget that skin weights can be saved, mirrored, copied and whatnot. Next step would be to write a quick wrapper, make it a tool and save lives! Cheers.— brave rabbit (@brave_rabbit) August 10, 2020
