I have been playing more and more with Maya’s API and starting to practice building some plugins like the one I released ealier, sePushPullConstraint. This time I decided to have a go with writing a deformer.

What this deformer does is bind and snap the closest vertices in a specific tolerance of the deformed mesh to a target mesh. The most challenging part was the binding process and finding the closest vertex on all the target meshes. I did this by using the MMeshIntersector class which gave huge speed improvement over other methods. This was a lot of trial and error to figure out the best method for constructing the data, the actual math behind it is relatively simple.

Particular features:

• Allows for multiple target meshes to drive the deforming mesh
• Paintable weight map to  blend between the target and the original position
• Can use either world or object space
• MEL command to connect and bind the mesh to the targets

Things I plan on adding:

• Add extra flags in the MEL command to edit and query the deformer
• Look into multi threading for possible speed increase. It’s already pretty quick without it, but want to see what performance I get with it.

Just wanted to share my projects as I create them. I don’t have plans right now to release it so please no requests, however any comments or questions are welcome.