BCS - BlendShape Combination System

The BCS is a plugin available for Autodesk Maya and Softimage XSI. It enables you to create high-end setups for facial animation. The main features include:

• Combination-Sculpting
  You can place deformation knots (called dataPoints) anywhere in the n-dimensional weight space. This means you get vertex-level control over the facial expression in every situation.
• Smooth Inbetweens
  A flexible inbetweening system with linear, spline and arc interpolation, among others.
• Automatic Left-Right Separation
  Fast left-right workflow with editable falloff curves for automatically created individual shapes.

If set up correctly, the deformation algorithm simulates real skin behaviour: The further movements interfere with each other, the more the BCS blends in the modeled corrections. This is done in a non-linear way where the movements stay more independent while they have low intensity.

Here are two deformation examples created using the BCS and the ACS using Maya:

The BCS is currently available for the following systems:

	Maya 2010 (32bit)	Maya 2010 (64bit)	Maya 2011 (32bit)	Maya 2011 (64bit)	Maya 2012 (32bit)	Maya 2012 (64bit)
Windows	v1.1.9	v1.1.9	v1.1.9	v1.1.9	v1.1.9	v1.1.9
Mac	-	-	N/A	v1.1.9	N/A	v1.1.9
Linux	N/A	v1.1.9	N/A	v1.1.9	N/A	v1.1.9

	XSI 6.5 (32bit)	XSI 6.5 (64bit)
Windows	v1.0	-
Linux	-	-

Note that the XSI version of the BCS is a complete re-write, so that features and usage may differ. Also, the version numbers do not correspond to the Maya version of the BCS.