Maya 2017 Update 3: Tension Deformer and Bake Deformer Tool

How to read this

Category

Production talk: DCC tool walkthrough (Maya deformation features)

Contributions

• Demonstrates the Tension deformer over a geodesic voxel bind to reduce facet tearing and stretching when arm, collarbone, and chest bones rotate, with iterations and envelope controls
• Demonstrates the Bake Deformer Tool transferring a weighted deformation result onto a target mesh and skeleton by measuring vertex displacement across bone rotations
• Shows baking the result into a plain skin cluster of five influences for game-engine export without the deformer

Context

A vendor walkthrough of Maya 2017 Update 3 deformation tools, relating to the general DCC-to-game-engine skinning and deformation-baking workflow.

Correctness

This is an Autodesk product demonstration, not peer-reviewed work; behavior shown is product-defined and results depend on the specific character, bind, and influence-count settings used in the demo.

Clarity

Highly accessible, step-by-step demo; a single viewing conveys what the tools do and how to invoke them.

How to read it

Watch once to learn when to reach for the Tension deformer versus Bake Deformer Tool; revisit the baking steps when you actually need to export deformer-driven results to a game engine.