Hello guys! I have decided to start entries in my blog showing you some deformers and nodes I have been developing the last year, some of them I used in the short film “Being Good”. I hope you enjoy these series of posts.
The first deformer I will show you it is a smooth deformer. I started to develop this deformer for using it in the “Being Good” shortfilm.

This is my smooth deformer. It is a C++ deformer for Maya. The smooth in every vertex is executed in parallel. It is paintable and it has two different algorithms for smoothing: Laplacian and Taubin.

Utility

A smooth deformer is very useful in 3D. Sometimes you want to smooth a mesh for example to remove some wringles, create more space in certain areas or just to smooth the mesh.
There are several algorithms to accomplish that, in the deformer I created I used two: Laplacian and Taubin.
The Laplacian algorithm calculate for every vertex an average position between connected vertex. This algorithm is really fast, but it has a problem, this algoritm doesn’t preserve the mesh volume.
The Taubin algorithm is very similar to Laplacian one, but in this case it tries to maintain the volume.

Options

In the deformer I developed you have the following options:

-Strength: it is the strength of the smooth. The higher strength, the smoother the mesh will be.
-Hard Borders: by default is off. By turning it on, the smooth is not applied to the mesh borders.
-Maintain: this is useful with the Laplacian algorthim. As using the Laplacian, the mesh loses volume, with this parameter you can push the vertex in the normals direction, trying to maintain the volume.
-Smooth type: Choose the algorithm used

Algorithm

Here there are two links, one to the wikipedia page of Laplacian and another to the paper about the Taubin algorithm.
Laplacian smoothing
Taubin smoothing

Example

Original

Laplacian

Laplacian + maintain shape option

Taubin