VizWorld.com

Indie software company Kickstand is trying to take their popular skin manipulation tools “Stretchmesh” and make it an open-source community project, hoping it will help with some of the delays in bringing it to new software packages.  However, before they’ll do it they want $15k to help maintain it and prove that people really want it.  They’ve started a project on IndieGoGo to raise the funds, which currently sits at only $450 donated.

So, if you’ve found Stretchmesh to be useful, maybe you should consider adding some into it so help bring it to the new 2012 products (and beyond).  If you’re not familiar with it, check out their demo videos below.

Kickstand Creatures: Volume 1 from kickstand.tv on Vimeo.

StretchMesh Foot Collision Demo from kickstand.tv on Vimeo.

Stretchmesh.

Graphics kickstand, software, stretchmesh

Kickstand, makers of StretchMesh, have just announced v1.5.   Working with Autodesk Maya, it’s a completely new character deformation pipeline. Director of Character Technology Daniel Dawson had this to say:

“Character skin is very elastic and difficult to animate. By giving polygonal meshes an inherent ‘stretchy’ characteristic, StretchMesh removes the time-intensive process of manually tweaking skin weights to streamline rigging of complex body and facial movements.”

Priced at $249 per set, the full 1.5 release is expected later this summer for Windows, Linux, and Mac. Read the full press release after the break.

Update: Image & Youtube Video from Kickstand added.

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Graphics kickstand, maya, plugin, software, stretchmesh