Going from using vanilla out of the box tools to writing your won deformer requires you to have a strong understanding of two things, performance optimization and deformation algorithm. In an environment like Maya they are both equally important (to over-simplify things). In a real-time environment like Unity performance is much more important. If ain't fast then it's worthless. Vanilla Unity doesn't have deformers because it's an engine not a rigging software, but sometimes

At Boulder I designed a wheel rig component that was used on several vehicles. The component included an auto-roll system using expressions; very similar to this setup. One of the vehicles however went through a design change so that it's wheels could roll and twist on a vertical axis, like a shopping cart. I had seen this demo a few years ago so I implemented it as parent component for the standard wheel component. This gave us results that were right for a shopping cart but

So I've been using this technique for a long time and I never see other people mention it so I thought I'd do a quick writeup. There are several ways to rivet a locator to a mesh in Maya but they are just ways of getting a position and orientation (ie: using a normal and some sort of tangent) from a consistent point on the mesh (ie: using a preset UV coordinate). These a very useful for when you need a control to follow along with a complex deformation, like riveting the lip

So I was taking a look at this great procedural animation tutorial and I was surprised that he used C# to aim the geckos head instead of using the aimConstraint that is available in unity. But I decided that it was a worthwhile exercise to recreate the aimConstraint since I hadn't gotten to work with matrices in unity yet, and I needed to get some practice on working with it's left handed coordinate system and column-based matrices. into things. It took some time reading the