Pose-Weight Interpolator
My colleague, Josh Nadel, and I created a Maya plug-in based on the SIGGRAPH talk "Pose-Weight Interpolation: a Lateral Approach to Pose-based Deformations" by Arthur Gregory.
When interpolating between different face blendshapes, common methods like GRBF and Simplex sometimes have some discontinuity, which this paper aims to improve. This paper's method uses Constrained Weight Smoothing to compote pose-weights on an n-dimensional mesh in pose-space such that weights for an arbitrary pose can be evaluated in O(1) time.
Over the course of a week, we created our own Maya plugin that registers a "poseWeightInterpolant" node. We can then connect a set of face blendshapes as the input to the node and a location in the grid. The node outputs the blendshape weights from the interpolation based on the location in the grid chosen.
We used:
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C++
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Maya
The following video shows the grid with the different blendshape faces and as the ball in the grid is moved around, the output (the big face on the right) changes its expression based on the interpolation: