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"character skinning made easy" ngSkinTools is a skinning plugin for Autodesk Maya, introducing new concepts to character skinning such as layers, any-pose-mirroring, enhanced paint brushes, true smoothing, and more. LAYERS Skinning layers are a central feature of ngSkinTools. With them, you break your rig down into easier manageable parts and edit them separately, then blend everything together through layer transparency. They're not just a simple way to make your work more organized - they also physically isolate groups of influences from the rest of the rig, so paint and edit operations won't mix-in influences you were not expecting. This also allows you do things that were impossible before: per-layer mirroring, adjusting influence weight up/down through layer transparency, blend transfered weights with previous weights, to name a few. MIRRORING You won't be needing to go to T-pose again when going through paint+mirror cycle, you can mirror in any pose now. There's also a much greater control over what influences mirror onto which one: associating left-right influences by name without prefix, manual association overrides, etc. Mirroring is also layer-friendly, so you can mirror just the parts of your model you're currently working on - very helpful, when you want to keep other parts of your rig intact. PAINTING ngSkinTools has it's own set of paint tools, which are capable of working on a per-layer basis. Each tool maintains it's own intensity, which is handy when toggling between smooth and replace through shift-modifier. Smooth is completely redesigned and you're going to just love it:) smoothing The new smooth brush gives much better results, as it operates on all influences of a vertex at once. For even greater control, the more precise "relax weights" tool is there, which also can smooth across mesh boundaries and thin meshes. COMPATIBILITY ngSkinTools operate on standard maya's skinCluster (also known as "smooth skin"), so no custom nodes will be req

wild collection of Maya API related links from a user on linkedin.com. some might be useful.

here all links again with a new line char inserted between each link... http://ncca.bmth.ac.uk/gallery/list_by/tag/maya http://www.simplymaya.com/download_pages/ http://www.davidlanier3d.com/Maya-plugins-MEL.htm http://www.oroboro.com/rafael/docserv.php/index/maya/article/maya http://www.gamedev.net/reference/programming/features/mayaexporter/ http://www.highend3d.com/maya/tutorials/development_api/ http://mayadqskinning.sourceforge.net/ http://www.comet-cartoons.com/3ddocs/mayaAPI/ http://modthemachine.typepad.com/ http://developer.nvidia.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=1600 http://thebuildingcoder.typepad.com/ http://www.andynicholas.com/?cat=27 http://www.tek2shoot.com/products/software-plugins/softimage-xsi/unexposed-mental-ray-shaders-v11-32-64bits/ http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems/gpugems_ch16.html http://blog.gamedeff.com/?p=78 http://www.blitzcode.net/3d_1.shtml#Lightmap_Compiler http://www.unifycommunity.com/wiki/index.php?title=SkinShader http://knol.google.com/k/koen-samyn/hlsl-per-vertex-lighting-shader/2lijysgth48w1/7#done http://www.alan-warren.com/tag/shader/ http://www.coniserver.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page http://www.headus.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=394 http://tamarind.free.fr/noctua/index.php/2010/03/23/a-simple-dependency-graph-library/#more-103 http://www.jb101.co.uk/2008/05/05/fixing-help-in-maya-2008/ http://blogs.msdn.com/b/gpalem/archive/2008/08/20/how-to-find-the-shading-groups-for-the-given-shape-node-in-maya-api.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/gpalem/ http://ludovic.chabant.com/devblog/ http://www.gogototo.com/a-post-about-maya-api-enviroment-setup.html http://dev.mokastudio.tv/taxonomy/term/4/0 http://efreedom.com/Question/1-2097306/Creating-Simple-Hierarchy-Structure-Maya-Using-Mel-Python http://coding4fun.org/?p=99 http://sayinghai.com/blog/?cat=14 http://graphics.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~drake/data/articles/ http://www.autodesk.com/us/maya/docs/Maya85/DeveloperResources/Introduction_to_Maya_Python_API.html http://www.scribd.com/login htt

This is a simple maya collision deformer to use with any arbitrary meshes.

thanks Brad! :)

A plugin version of a corrective blend shape solution for rigging in maya.

- thanks for the link, Shorty! :)

We had Christian (b-ling) write a tangent space blendshape when he was still new at Framestore, and he made the comment that he made was that it was much easier, faster and more effective than the corrective blendshape.

interesting collection of free plugins for maya

The rapid rig is a tool designed to bridge the gap between character modeling and character animation. Using the user interface, the script enables the user to set up a bi-pedal character skeleton and rig in minutes, a process which can take up to several days. The advanced version of the rig comes with enhanced features including: * customizable number of fingers and toes * stretchy and "toony" arms, legs, neck and spine * elbow and knee locking and following in inverse kinematics * orientation control for hips, shoulders, head and eyes * optional geometry created based on the user's rig set-up, as well as other animator-friendly controls. * animation interface for speeding up animation pipeline

thanks for the link, Jakub! :)

This is a custom Maya brush which makes smoothing skin weights very fast and easy to do. Because it smooths all influences at once there is not the typical normalization problem which the standard Maya smooth skin brush has (normalize = interactive). When normalization is on post, the result gets not smooth immediatley, so you would have to switch between all influences to get it really smooth. With tf_smoothSkinWeight.py you get in both situations a smooth and correct result immediately. Benefits: - smooth weights with a few strokes - saves a lot of time - weights all joints at once - no need to worry about normalization - creates a really nice and smooth weight-transition

thanks Brad for the link!

hi guys, this is tec-wizard Jan Berger describing his custom full IK body system he made as plugin for Maya. Streamed from live broadcast archive of Rigging Dojo, a Texas based group of rigging mentors (btw. they were originally named "Rigging Mentor", but guess who insisted with legal issues... ;)