New Maya Skin Weight import/export tool available

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#1

After two years of working on it in my spare time, I’m releasing my custom skin weight import/export tool free to the public. Happy Holidays.

Having built holistic art → engine pipelines for multiple studios (Visceral/EA, Sledgehammer Games/Activision, 31st Union/2K), part of which include fully procedural rigging solutions, one of the biggest areas that is missing in that pipeline-subset is a solid/repeatable skin weight export/import process in Maya.

The tools that Maya provides lack features (and can be slow), and there isn’t anything I could find (free or $paid$) that had the feature-set I wanted/needed.

This tool aims to alleviate any issues for the techart team regardless of industry. It is in-use and proven in AAA game production.

I welcome any thoughts/feedback/improvements you have via the github.

Edit: I should call out this requires Python 3 + numpy & scipi : the docs explain how to easily install these dependencies on Maya 2022+

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#2

That looks rather awesome, curious about the license though.

The NoDerivatives part seems to forbid it being used in anyone else’s tools

#3

Thanks for bringing it up @bob.w : Honestly I was trying to get ‘something’ in there for release: Since the code is obfuscated you couldn’t modify it if you tried anyway: You can use it in your production however you want, but since you can’t modify the source, the NoDerivatives seems moot (?)

BTW, I’m open to suggestions for a better license. Basically:

  • Anyone is free to use it for anything.
  • I’m not responsible for damages if you do bad stuff.

Give me a licence that fits that bill and I’ll update it :wink:

#4

Pretty much any of the more permissive open souce licenses provide this.
My usual recommendation is MIT for minimal “not my problem what you do with it”.

#5

My code isn’t open source, that’s the rub. I’m not sure how attaching an open source license to closed source code works exactly, seems ‘incorrect’?

#6

Ah, then in that case, you’d probably want something to effect of “all rights reserved”. Because legally speaking others can’t copy your code without some kind of explicit license allowing them too, which is the whole point of an open source license.
If you don’t have the ability to use such a license (say your company actually owns the code in question) you should probably check with them about even keeping it out in the open just to cover yourself.

#7

I have full approval to retain my personal rights to the source independent from my day-job, so no issues there (but it took a lot of back and forth with that legal dept for some time…).

But trying to find a license for close-source code seems way harder than open source, lol.

  • You can use it free of charge
  • You can’t modify it (since you don’t have source, you can’t if you tried).
  • But clearly you can extend / adapt it into your pipeline via it’s API, that’s encouraged.
  • You can’t (re)sell it, but you can sell things made with it.
  • You can’t blame me for anything :wink:

I’ve been looking around the web for good close-source code examples, but quickly the legal-speak overwhelms and my eyes roll back in my head :stuck_out_tongue:

In the meantime I’ve added some new rules to the license, and changed the core to
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
which is far less restrictive.