Real Time Interactive Deformer Rig Evaluations in Maya using GPUs

ABSTRACT Maya has supported evaluating deformer nodes on GPU since 2016. However, such GPU support in Maya is limited to evaluating simple linear chains of deformer nodes. In feature productions, character rigs have a complex network of deformation chains resulting in most deformers being evaluated on CPU. Here we will detail such architectural limitations within Maya. Then we present our approach that overcomes these limitations to fully evaluate deformation networks on GPU, which has enabled our rigs to perform over 50fps on GPU, compared to 5fps on CPU.