The Brave Rabbit offers a free weightDriver Node for Maya, a vector based pose reader that can be used as a tool on its own, or to give others compatibility with scenes that have been created wight he Shapes plugin.
weightDriver node is a free plugin to make scenes work which were created with SHAPES and give others access to a free vector based reader
A while back, The Brave Rabbit released “Shapes”, a new and complete blend shape editing tool designed to unify the process of creating and editing blend shapes and correctives in Autodesk Maya.
When building character rigs it easily can become necessary to implement a vector based pose reader in order to overcome rotational issues due to Euler rotationsIngo Clemens – BraveRabbit.de
An integral component in the Shapes Blend Shape tool has been the weightDriver plugin and recently, the Brave Rabbit made the weightDriver plugin freely available for download and use.
Vector Pose Readers & the weightDriver Plugin
Typically, character work will go more smoothly by implementing a vector based pose reader, which can overcome issues due to Euler rotations. It is possible to solve some issues through the use of expressions and set drive keys, however more complex rig setups will most likely fail when there are two or more rotational axes involved.
This is where vector based readers will excel, as they rely on orientation and not axis rotation. As Ingo notes, it is possible to build your own vector based pose reader, in fact, Marco Giordano walked us through creating one in the post Building a Pose Reader in Maya Using Nodes.
This works fine, but there can be issues with using a custom network, the main one being that they will take longer to evaluate, eating away at your scene’s performance.
Availability
the weightDriver plugin is freely available though braverabbit.de and works with Maya versions (OSX, Windows x64 and Linux x64): 2012, 2013, 2013.5, 2014, 2015. For more information and an explanation of all weightDriver attributes you can check out SHAPES User Guide.
Check out the weightDriver Plugin for Maya here.
