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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

"Welcome to our website. We, a couple of Tech-Artists (and geeks) decided to come up with our vision about having a platform where we can put out our ideas and discuss with everyone as well. We are fans of open-source, learning so much from the community and we would like to give something back. The reason creaturerigs.com was created. We are CharacterTDs mainly working with Autodesk Maya among other softwares. Check out our Tools and Rigs available in the Download section of our website. Go Ahead, check it out, have interesting fun with it and we would love to have your feedback on anything and everything. In the Coming weeks, we will continue to share more ideas, break down Animation Rigs with traditional setups, showcase our own setups and develop/maintain Auto-Rigging tools as well."

Animation Tools - a set of free Maya-tools targeted at reducing the amount of tedious work associated with the setup process of high quality, animatable characters. The Adaptable Facial Setup is capable of driving any humanoid geometry, drawing from an extensive, FACS-based library of facial movement components. The process of fitting the head skeleton to the individual geometry is simplified by offering a standard set of skin weights that accommodates the typical deformation regions of the face. Any skin weights may be cloned topology-independent from one head to another utilizing the Geometry Matching Tool. The Corrective Blendshape Manager offers a useful way to add subtle deformations to a skinned mesh. Blendshape targets can be created and edited, and are computed with respect to the bind pose of the skinned mesh.

Wrap is a topology transfer tool. It allows to utilize the topology you already have and transfer it onto your new 3D-scanned data. The resulting models will not only share the same topology and UV-coordinates but also will naturally become blendshapes of each other.

- improve your drawing skills - learn new techniques - see other artists work check out models > drawing tool

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! :)

FaceTracker is a C/C++ API for real time generic non-rigid face alignment and tracking. Goal: Non-rigid face alignment and tracking is a common problem in computer vision. It is the front-end to many algorithms that require registration, for example face and expression recognition. However, those working on algorithms for these higher level tasks are often unfamiliar with the tools and peculiarities regarding non-rigid registration (i.e. pure machine learning scientists, psychologists, etc.). Even those directly working on face alignment and tracking often find implementing an algorithm from published work to be a daunting task, not least because baseline code against which performance claims can be assessed does not exist. As such, the goal of FaceTracker is to provide source code and pre-trained models that can be used out-of-the-box, for the dual purpose of: 1. Promoting the advancement of higher level inference algorithms that require registration. 2. Providing baseline code to promote quantitative improvements in face registration. Features: * Real time: ranging from 20-30 fps (depending on processor, compiler and use of OpenMP) * Generic: designed to work for most people under most conditions * No training required: a pre-trained model is provided * Detection based initialisation: no user intervention required * Automatic failure detection: requires no user re-initialisation * Camera or video input

Thanks Maurizio for the link!

This comes out of work I presented as a SIGGRAPH 97 Technical Sketch. The demo is mostly an experiment to isolate the minimal number of facial expression elements that will produce a "convincing" impression of character and personality. Of course this is just a subset of the full range of expression the human face is capable of. Paul Ekman's pioneering work on the Facial Action Coding System gives a functional description of the full range of expression of which the human face is capable.

I did send it a year a go, and have been looking at it off and on since it was created. As a simple base set of points it's wonderfully expressive and shows how much reads with so little adjusted. Head angle and noise plays a big part in this too.

I was playing with that. Very cool! It just shows the system, simplied as possible. What is "heas" angle?

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!