Kickstand develops tools and techniques to revolutionize all aspects of animation production. As artists and programmers with experience in animated feature film, TV, and games, our mission is to advance the art of animation through technology.StretchMesh is a new paradigm for surface deformation. By using a fast algorithm for relational vertex knowledge, smooth character deformations can be created quickly and with superior results over existing techniques. StretchMesh is implemented as a standard Maya deformer to work seamlessly with and enhance existing work flows.

 

Features:

Skinning Killer

Eliminate hours of painting weights.

 

Character Contact:

Surfaces can now collide with objects in the world for more realism.

 

All-in-One Deformation Solution

Bodies and Faces can be set up quickly and easily with natural skin motion such as stretching, sliding, and bending.

 

Production Ready

Integrates with pipelines of any size.

 

Feature Quality Results

Achieve feature film quality results quickly.

 

Versatile

StretchMesh is a modeling tool, a realtime deformer, and/or a render time relaxation operation.

 

Attractors

Pull points while maintaining stretchy behavior to quickly create shapes or act as animation controls.

 

Intuitive Deformations

Painting interface allows users to modify attributes such as stiffness and attractor influence. Multi-threaded Performance

Multi-threading available for Maya 2009+ only.

 

Fast Primitive Collision Objects

Primitive sphere and primitive curve colliders. Primitive sphere colliders behave like mesh sphere colliders, but with significantly better performance. Primitive curve colliders provide an array of radius values along the length of a curve which define a collision tube or capsule, offering significantly better performance than equivalent mesh colliders.

 

Curve Attractors

Curve attractors provide the ability to pull vertices toward the closest point on a curve. As an example, this technique is useful in facial rigging, where the vertices of an eyebrow need to be pulled toward a target curve.

 

Robust Collision Control

The influence of a collision object can now be painted, giving users per-vertex control over collision behavior.

 

Workflow Improvements

A new "Scale Safe" mode allows a mesh to be scaled while preserving the initial mesh shape.

 

Homepage - http://www.kickstandlabs.com/