Why? So I've been doing some prototyping for facial rig structure, and one of the the key changes is that certain nodes can exist between input and output interface nodes. If you don't know what I mean by that take a look at "Cult of Rig". I need nodes between them in order to remap driven behavior (like having the inner brow control pull the mid brow control at a certain rate, or change how a corrective blendShape interpolates). I'm using animCurves for this because they can have constant or linear tangents at the end. I also need nodes between them to add together those driver values (for example the mid brow control is driven by the inner control and the main brow control). Ideally I woul
MASH is a really great tool. It's not super useful for character rigging, but I've used it several times for props, specifically conveyor belts. The simple way to set up a conveyor belt is to to create a single "tile" of the geometry. Use a MASH distribute node to turn it into a line of those segments. Then use a curveWarp deformer with a closed curve in the shape of your conveyor belt. To animate it you can connect into the curveWarp deformers offset attribute. There is one major limitation. The curveWarp deformer will match each vertexes position in the bounding box to the corresponding point on the curve. So a point in the middle of the bounding box will be attached to the middle of the
One of the most tedious parts of painting weight is splitting weight among multiple influences. But with this technique you can easily adjust the falloff between the influences while keeping the same overall weight. I tried getting this to work with a python callback so that it split as you updated the weights but it was too slow. That's not an issue if you use ngSkinTools but is an issue for non-skinCluster deformers. I am working a custom node that can split the weights while you paint them but it's a tough task because of the callbacks that you need to have for the animCurves, but hopefully it'll be fast enough.
