Hello Maya people.  I've been on a whirlwind tour of game studios all across North America in recent weeks/months.  Luckily I've had the last two weeks at home to recuperate.  It’s given me a chance to do a little sorely needed house cleaning.  In the process I rediscovered this movie that I created a while back showing the Make Joints Dynamic tool from BonusTools.  It essentially allows you to apply dynamics to an existing joint chain either by connecting hair, nCloth or a jiggle deformer to the joints. 

This came up recently at a meeting with a game developer that I was visiting.  They were trying come up with an easy way to create some quick secondary animation for a few of their characters.  They didn’t want to deal with the performance overhead of doing it dynamically in the game engine and instead wanted to create it on the Maya side and simply bake it down to joints.

This is a tool that I wrote quite a while ago, back when hair and then nCloth first came out.  It can now be used with nHair as well since any classic hair dynamic curve can now be switched to use Nucleus as the solver, thus allowing dynamic curves to interact with nCloth, nMeshes, nParticles, nConstraints, etc...

Enjoy.

BonusTools 2013 : Make Joints Dynamic