Thanks again for all your contributions to ART! We’ve had to take a little time off from ART development to do some production work, and prepare TSMGame and TSM3 for release. But now we’re getting back to the alpha version.

Right now we’re working on building a good interface for the pose-space deformer. Basically, it lets you define a pose-space from any set of attributes, and then build a set of poses for that space. Just like a blend shape, the sculpt for each pose is a mesh in the scene that you can edit with any of Maya’s tools (as long as you don’t mess up the point order).

Because we’re building a true pose-space deformer, the pose-space isn’t limited to being defined by joint rotation (or in our case, curve tangents at the joint). You can put any arbitrary set of attributes in the pose space, making it extremely flexible—you can, for instance, use it with facial controls to have a wrinkle appear when the controls are in a specific configuration.

Thanks again! We’ll keep all of you updated as things progress.

I just wanted to thank you all again for your contributions, and give you an idea of what the timetable for ART is like now. With only ten days remaining, it seems pretty clear that we will not be getting close to our original goal. This doesn’t put the product in jeopardy, as we will be bringing it out regardless of how much the campaign brings in. However, it does mean we won’t be able to accelerate the development to the degree we had originally planned. So instead of looking at a beta version being ready in June, we’re aiming to have it out later in the summer

Even though it seems unlikely we’d meet our original goal, your contributions have still been incredibly helpful to us in getting ART out in a more timely manner. I can’t wait to get it into your hands!

—Raf