skinTransforms

This is a proof of concept of a Transfer a skin cluster to transforms. THIS IS A BETA RELEASE USE AT YOUR OWN RISK

Motivation

Sometime you want to have a transforms following a skinned mesh, all common contraints (follicle, geometry contraints, point on poly) ends adding the transform dependency to the mesh, making that mesh to miss GPU evaluation and optimization

Posposal

Add a new nothe that carry the skinCluster weights and inputs but output a list of matrices to contraint transforms. Allowing to:

compute outside the deformation stack, so all the mesh deformation doesnt needs to be evaluated to get the transform posiiton
break the compute dependency to the mesh allowing all deformers compute on the GPU

As you can see on the node graph, the mesh is not a part of the dependecy graph

Using skintransfomrs.mll

Before start

Pre Compiled version

A precompiled Windows version for maya2019 is provided in the release folder.

Compile you own version

No external libreries are needed beside the Maya libraries dependencies Maya help has a small tutorial on hot to setup visual studio for Maya, Linux or Mac Os How setup visual Studio

Running instrucions

Creating a simple skinned scene as exmaple

from maya import cmds
cmds.file(new=1,f=1)
#loading the plugin
cmds.loadPlugin(r'D:\dev\MayaNodes\skinTransforms\release\skinTransforms.mll')
#create a simple skinned mesh
joints = [cmds.joint(p=(1, 0, 1))]
joints.append(cmds.joint(p=(0, 0, 0)))
cmds.joint(joints[-1], e=1, zso=1, oj='xyz', sao='yup')
joints.append(cmds.joint(p=(1, 0, -1)))
cmds.joint(joints[-1], e=1, zso=1, oj='xyz', sao='yup')
mesh = cmds.polyTorus()[0]
skin = cmds.skinCluster(joints, mesh)[0]
#create the transforms to drive
positions = [(1.2, .5, -.5), (0,0,-1.5)]
for each in positions:
    cube = cmds.polyCube(w=.5, h=.5, d=.5)[0]
    cmds.polyColorPerVertex(cube, r=1, g=0, b=1, a=1, cdo=True)
    cmds.xform(cube, ws=1, t=each)

Having a skinned mesh and the transforms to drive you need to run

import sys
sys.path.append(r'D:\dev\MayaNodes\skinTransforms')
from pyutils import skinTransforms
skinTransforms.createSkinTansformNode('skinCluster1', ['pCube1', 'pCube2'])

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details

sowwic/skinTransforms