Recent changes affecting Maya deformers and deformer attributes.
This section contains various improvements for deformers and deformation effects.
For information about new deformers added for this release, see the New Solidify deformer and New Morph deformer topics.
Deformer Falloff effects
Compare: A plane with a Bend deformer and the same geometry with a Primitive falloff effect
Previously, you could only create Falloffs for deformers using the Node Graph, which was time-consuming.
Now, when you add a deformer to geometry, an Input Attribute widget is added to the Attribute Editor Deformer tab that lets you easily create falloff effects. See Deformer Falloff Input Attributes widget
Right-click the Falloff Input Attribute widget to use color ramp visualization to view Falloff effects. Skin Cluster weights also have been exposed to let you get skin weight data from the skinCluster node so you can use Skin Cluster influence weights in falloff networks.
Deformer Falloffs support Component Tags, letting you apply deformations to specific components within geometry. See the section Geometry that has Component Tags and a deformer in the Create deformer falloffs topic.
There are several types of falloff effects you can use. For a description of each type, see Deformer falloffs.
A Falloff applied to a Wave deformer
- Falloff support for Skin Cluster
- You can now adjust per-influence skinCluster weight envelope using a component falloff.
The influence of a spine joint being extracted and driving the area of influence for a Delta Mush deformer.
- FalloffEval Node
- The new
falloffEval node further expands the falloff system and supports legacy deformers. Use falloffEval node to evaluate falloffs on geometry which you can then used to drive legacy weights.
The falloffEval node used to drive pre-target weights on the blendShape node. A single mirrored shape target is split into a left and right target using Primitive Falloffs to define their area of influence.
Other deformer improvements
- Skin Binding using Proximity wrap
- A new menu has been added to the Bind Skin Options to let you use the Proximity wrap deformer to bind skin. This new setting uses the Proximity wrap deformer to bind skinClusters.
- A Dropoff Rate Scale attribute has been added to the Proximity Wrap deformer to let you control the inverse distance weight from the driver.
- Cluster deformer modifications
-
The Resolution and Percent Resolution attributes have been removed from the Cluster Deformer node. These attributes were intended to improve speed, and are no longer needed thanks to Maya's recent performance improvements.
- deformableShapes command
- A new-createTweakNode element has been added to the deformableShapes command to let you create a Tweak node if you need one.
- Use the following command whenever you need a Tweak node to make the componentTag shape behave the same as the deprecated GroupID shape.
deformableShape -createTweakNode TagShape;