What's New in Character Animation in Maya 2017 Update 3

Filter for controller nodes

A new Show Controllers Object option has been added to the Display menu Show options to let you filter your scene for Controller objects, regardless of type (NURBS, locator, or shape).

Note: This option is available only with Viewport 2.0.

Deformer Improvements

New Delta Mush attributes

A new Distance Weight attribute lets you account for the distance between vertices when calculating the "mush". It is set to 0.0 by default, which matches the previous behavior.

The Delta Mush deformer now has a GPU counterpart which has shown a speed up from 2 - 4x over the new CPU version in limited testing. The GPU version of the Delta Mush deformer also allows the deformation chain to remain on the GPU in more cases, which also provides additional performance gains. The CPU version of the Delta Mush deformer has been reworked to incorporate the new functionalities and also to allow for a GPU version. As a result, this work has also created performance gains for the CPU version.

Inward and Outward constraints retain the contour of the deformed mesh shape just before the delta mush deformer. Use this when working with a displacement set to a low value, but it also provides good results in other cases.

The cacheFrames attribute has been removed based on previous feedback.

• Delta Mush Options

Tension Deformer

A new Tension deformer lets you simulate surface tension without squashing and stretching the surface too much. It uses the connectivity between the mesh vertices to preserve the (relative) lengths between them.

Vertices manipulated without and with Tension deformer effects

• Tension Deformer
• Tension Options
• Create Tension deformers

Bake Deformers

The new Bake Deformer Tool calculates smooth bind weights that approximate deformations from arbitrary deformers. This can have good results with deformers such as the Rigid Bind and Delta Mush.

Bake Deformer lets you export complex rigs to applications that have limited deformer support, as well as being a quick trick for determining default character bind weights.

You can currently only open this tool through the Maya Command Line using the BakeDeformerTool command.

• Bake Deformer Tool
• Bake deformers on a character

Updated deformerWeights commands

The examples for the deformerWeights Python/MEL commands in the Maya Technical Documentation have been updated for clarity and expanded to provide more detail. For example, you can now copy and paste the command examples into the Script Editor.

Viewport 2.0 enhancements

See What's New in General in Maya 2017 Update 3 for Viewport 2.0 enhancements for character animators.