Full Torso Deformation With Joints On Curves
Testing Shoulder Deformation With Joints On Curves
Check out Matt Le-Fevre's approach.
Matt Le Fevre, Senior Technical Artist at Ninja Theory, recently revisited an old project based on a system where poses drive curves, which in turn drive joints, looking pretty elegant.
He has presented a shoulder and chest skinning test using joints only, with no blend shapes or additional deformers. According to him, the curve shapes are authored by the user for each pose added to the system, along with the position along the curve, non-uniform scale, and twist offset around the curve tangent.
The newer video at the top shows the joint/curve system more clearly. Cloth or armor apparently works pretty much the same way, but this isn't intended to replace a proper cloth solution.
This one is a recent joint-based hair animation test:
Matt has plenty of cool ideas to share. For example, we previously featured his hand deformation study using Maya and nCloth. You can learn more about it in this article.
Looking for more cool rigging solutions? Check out Igor Silva's RBF muscle setup or Fuyumidori's showcase of chest muscle movement for a VRChat avatar.