So I added the tangent calculation the the test code and got a pretty shocking result. When just computing the point on the curve the optimized method was 2x as fast as the Maya API method. When you compute both the position and the tangent it ends up being around 3-3.5x as fast (I'm testing with 100,000 points). So it seems like the Maya API code is very optimized for single points but there's a lot of room for improvement in specialized cases like my deformer. Hopefully th

So I've continued learning more about nurbs curves to try and optimize the nurbs surface calculations that are the biggest time sink for the translateUVN deformer. In part 2 I had a working setup for calculating a point on a nurbs curve that was approximately twice as fast but was only set up for a 2-span nurbs curve. This time I've extended it to work for any nurbs curve. Below is the code but be warned there are lots of safety checks that are not present in the code because

Unlike in a skinCluster-based system if you use a translateUVN deformer you'll need to define which maps are left/right pairs for each other. To do this we just need: An inputWeightList attribute An outputWeightList attribute (these attributes need to have useArrayDataBuilder set to true so that they update properly) A the left and right vertex pairing for each shape An internal system for pairing the input and output shape plugs. Those first two requirements can be done with

I had a post on this blog from around 6 months ago about how to create a vanilla version of a normalized control because the custom transform node method I was pursuing ended up being more complicated to implement because of manipulator issues. I finally toyed around with the parentOffsetMatrix attribute that was added in Maya 2020 and it's great. The whole system can be compressed from 4 transforms nodes (zero, offset, normal, control) to a single control node that does it a