BlendShape Monitor for Maya helps fix your messy character rigs
Artist and tools developer Johnson Lee has released BlendShape Monitor 1.0, his much-anticipated new Maya plugin for managing blendshape-based rigs.
The tool – which brilliantly, abbreviates to BS Monitor 1.0 – displays the output of individual shapes as real-time heatmaps during animation playback, helping troubleshoot complex rigs.
According to Lee, it is intended to enable artists to spend “less time hunting for sliders” and “more time [on] art work” when working with shape-based facial and full-body rigs.
Designed to tackle bottlenecks in character rigging for games, animation and VFX
Lee developed BlendShape Monitor to solve bottlenecks in his own professional workflow: his day job as Art Director at Reallusion includes developing base characters for its software.
The facial rig for Aaron, the main base character for Character Creator 5, features over 100 blendshapes: both FACS shapes and corrective morphs.
Many full-body character rigs used in production also use blendshapes as corrective morphs in RBF (Radial Basis Function) setups, particularly for problem areas like shoulders.
Managing such rigs using the standard Maya UI can be an unintuitive, time-consuming process, with artists frequently having to guess a blendshape’s region of influence from its name.
“As rigs grow more complex, with hundreds of targets … managing them through standard lists becomes a major bottleneck,” says Lee. “I developed the BS Monitor to solve this.”
Visualize the influence of individual shapes in the Maya viewport as real-time heatmaps
To resolve the bottleneck, BlendShape Monitor makes the process of troubleshooting shape-based rigs a visual rather than a numerical one.
It displays the area of influence of the blendshapes selected directly on the character in the Maya viewport, as a color-coded heatmap, updating in real time during animation playback.
The visual feedback makes it much easier to spot problems, like overlapping deformations, unwanted offsets or “dirty” vertex movements.
A built in weight filter automatically hides inactive shapes to keep the UI clean.
Price and system requirements
BlendShape Monitor 1.0 is compatible with Maya 2022+. Individual licenses have a standard price of $20. Studio licenses cost $70 per seat.
Read more about BlendShape Monitor for Maya in the product’s Gumroad store listing
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