PoseDeformer

In my quest to preserve volume in the wrist and fingers I stumbled upon Michael Comet's PoseDeformer. This is a wonderful tool. It makes use of cone readers or pose readers (that you can learn to make here) and a custom poseDeformer node to blend between poses and add or subtract volume. Epic!

It took me a while, but I was able to find a version of it that works on linux Maya 2014. Thanks to David from DJX blog for all of his work keeping scripts up to date and Erik Johansson-Evegård for the linux version.

In only thirty minutes I was able to improve the volume preservation. We will definitely be using this plug-in on the film, and I already talked to Chris to get it in the pipeline.

Before

Here's a tutorial on how to use it.

I am testing all this on the Kayla rig by Josh Sobel.

Things to teach:

Basic Troubleshooting

Pole Vectors

Constraints

Set Driven Keys