Rigging papers

Because of the boring commute / subway riding I have been reading papers/sketches. Here are some of my favorites. I really hope to find some time in the near future to write a few more Maya plug-ins / nodes or improve my old ones.

Spiderman 3 Muscle and Skin Musculoskeletal Skinning
https://erickmiller.com/docs/sap_434_MusculoSkeletalShapeSkinning.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNCB9wZP8k8&feature=relmfu

• Muscle shape: NURBS surface from curves, keep volume
• Muscle to skin deformer: paintable linear or dual quaternion interpolation, paintable sliding (bulge/shrink along attachment vector)
• Pose space deformer
• Jiggle deformer: For muscle shapes, spring based solver/equasion
• Skin tension: spring based, projected back on mesh (closest point), user defined smooth/average steps

iRobot Character Pipeline Tools and Methods
https://erickmiller.com/docs/iRobot_Character_Pipeline_sketches_0250.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mX9rMQv4TC0

• Animation curve re-mapping with NURBS surface
• Gaussian filtering on animation against motion pops
• Pose based deformation
• Custom wrap deformer
• Animation friendly jiggle node
• Custom cluster deformer
• Deform eye geometry to fake eye refraction

Basically all papers by Erick Miller are super-cool, especially if you look at how old some of them are. He uploaded most (or all?) of the demo videos on his YouTube account:
https://www.youtube.com/user/erickmiller

And this is a more educational paper:
The Morphology of Digital Creatures
https://www.tim-mclaughlin.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Morphology_of_Digital_Creatures-SIGGRAPH_2007_course.pdf