Monday, March 9th, 2015 Posted by Jim Thacker

Hans Godard releases RBF Solver for Maya

Naughty Dog character TD Hans Godard has released RBF Solver, an intriguing new add-on for Maya that should make it easier to incorporate automatic corrective joints and blendshapes into character rigs.

Drive anything with any number of inputs, of any types
The concept behind the RBF Solver – it stands for ‘Radial Basis Function’ – is similar to Maya’s native Set Driven Key workflow, in which one attribute of an object is used to drive another.

But whereas driven keys are limited to one attribute at a time, the RBF solver interpolates between any number of ‘poses’, themselves defined using n-dimensional keys and m-dimensional values.

If that sounds baffling, the video above makes things clearer: the essential point is that the solver accepts any number of input and output parameters.

In practical terms, that means it can be used for tasks like applying corrective blendshapes, or more complex joint-based corrections, to automatically fix mesh deformation issues when reposing a character.

The solver is a Python implementation, without any dependencies.

Pricing and availability
RBF Solver is available now for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux through the Autodesk Exchange app store, price $199. It comes with two sample scenes.

Read more about RBF Solver on the Autodesk Exchange website