Interpolative Blendshape, RigidWrap & MeshController!

 I came across a pretty cool resource today, three Maya plugins available to freely download!

interpBlendshape - a way to create non-linear blendshapes for delicious non-vanilla blendshape deformation (face rigs!)

rigidWrap - a unique solution to bind rigid pieces (scales, armour etc) to an organic mesh but keeping their rigidity. Looks very handy!

meshController - a way to use deforming meshes as a means to control the mesh itself for intuitive selection & animation (again, particular useful for facial anim)

 All credit to Zhenggang Deng, and pretty incredible that we're able to grab all of these for free from his site here: https://www.cgdzg.com/download_file/

Joint physics article

What a beautifully concise and articulated article on the logic/maths behind a physics joint chain. Will be very useful for learning about this and re-creating this in your own tools:

 https://shirzadbahrami.com/physics-based-animation-undulation/

New MotionCapture Adventures

 Recently, the TechAnim team at CA have taken ownership of the motion capture studio, which has allowed me to learn more about the Vicon camera system and overall mocap pipeline. It's been fascinating to delve into the more tangible side of animation, with physical props to play with, and physics problems to overcome.

It kind of feels like a strange arcane magic, blessing a large room by waving a stick with LEDs on it in order to 'calibrate' a room, placing markers on a person and getting them to do a hula-hoop movement in order to 'calibrate' a person.

And then at the end of it, you get a load of animations that albeit needs rework, but ultimately has saved weeks of time with tons of tasty secondary motion that would have been near impossible to hand-animate. Pure magic!