MyMayaPlugin - Improved Delta Mush Maya Deformer

This repository contains a Maya plugin that implements the method from my paper on handling self-intersections in character animation. (still in development)

Paper:
Improving Delta Mush Based Character Animation (CESCG 2025)

Original framework:
Haragos99/sample-framework

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About Delta Mush

Delta Mush is a mesh deformation algorithm that produces smooth, volume-preserving skinning results by applying Laplacian smoothing and then reintroducing the original surface details through delta vectors. It is widely used in character animation to obtain natural-looking deformations and to reduce artifacts such as collapsing joints. more info in the paper.

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Features

• Laplacian smoothing
• Rest-delta computation
• Self-intersection handling using a third-party Tight-Inclusion CCD library
• CCD-based adaptive scaling of delta vectors (Improved Delta Mush)
• UI controls to enable/disable the improved method and adjust smoothing / strength for collided points
• Visualization toggles for collided faces, collided points, and delta vectors

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Results

DM vs IMD — Example 1

Difference between original Delta Mush (DM) and Improved Delta Mush (IMD). Collided faces are shown in red, collided points are shown in purple.

DM vs IMD — Example 2

Another comparison showing how IMD reduces self-intersection artifacts.

Linear Blend Skinning

A simple weighted LBS example without Delta Mush. (Used as the base for the above Delta Mush examples.)

UI: Feature Toggle & Strength Slider

Showcasing the plugin UI: toggle between original/improved Delta Mush and adjust the smoothing/strength slider.

Visualization of Delta Vectors

Visual debug view of delta vectors used to restore surface detail after smoothing.

Figures from the Paper

On each paper figure, the default Delta Mush result appears on the left, while the result using CCD-based scaling of delta vectors (the proposed method) appears on the right.

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Third-party libraries

• Tight-Inclusion CCD - collision detection used for self-intersection handling (external library)
• Eigen - linear algebra / matrix computations
• spdlog - logging

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Dependencies

• Maya DevKit (2022–2026)
• CMake ≥ 3.18
• C++20 compatible compiler
• Eigen (header-only)
• Tight-Inclusion CCD (linkable library)
• spdlog

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Build

Requirements

Make sure the Maya DevKit is installed and environment variables for the Maya SDK are set (e.g., MAYA_API_DIR, MAYA_LOCATION, or similar depending on your platform).

Example build (out-of-source)

mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build . --config Release