Export and Import Deformers Weights
I have faced the challenge of dealing with exporting and importing several deformer weights in Maya. In my previous job, as in most studios, we often needed to rebuild rigs, and currently it's necessary to manually do the exporting and importing weights deformers, which can be really time-consuming and stresfull.
To simplify this, I created a script that automates the entire process. With just one click, I can export all the weights from a given group with geometries, and with another click, I can import them back, saving tons of time.
In the video you can notice it works with a given path, but if not given path, then it would automatically save the weights in the same path as the geometry.
So far it works perfectly with lattice, skin and nonlinear deformers, in theory it would be easy and fast to add new deformers, just modifyin one line of the code, the only one that might generate some problems is blendshapes, I might take a look at it in the future if I face the issue.
Transfer Blendshapes From Low to High Geometry
I came across the issue of having extremely dense geometry. To tackle it, I created a proxy geo to sculpt the shapes and then transfer them to the high-res geometry. The problem was that the high-res geometry was way too dense, and using the classic wrap and activating the shape was causing harsh and strange deformations
After experimenting a bit, I found a solution (actually SHAPES from brave rabbit gave me the answer) and I wrote a script to transfer all the shapes from low-res to high-res with just one click. The video shows how it looked with a simple wrap vs how it looks after using the script.
This script does not connect the high poly to the low poly geometry, but rather transfers the shapes and copies the connections from the low poly to a new blendshape node in the high poly.
Mirror Blendshapes
A couple yeas ago, my suppervisor asked me to do this tool, as you can see in the video it basically mirror left blendshapes to the right side with one click, so far it works great, and one thing that is incredible useful is that you can use it with a posed character.
Recently I took the time to make a new version of it, cleaning the old script and making it more efficient.
In my TODO list I have to create window for this tool, right now it only works from left to right and it only works with naming "_L_" to "_R_", the script already allows you to modify this variable for whatever you want to use or if you decide to do the opposite direction, also there is an option to mirror the driven key nodes connected to the target shapes in case they are connected that way. As I just said this is already in the script, I just need to create some time to create a window to add this funtionality to the final used.