Skin Deformer

Here is an animation I did a while back. I decided to re-render it as a gif using the latest Arnold Skin shader for Maya.

  • The mesh is called Diatom and was exported from Xenodream as an .obj.

  • I then applied a bend deformer to the mesh and keyframed the rotation.

 The interesting thing that occurs when deforming geometry in Maya is that the normals get flipped. This creates quite an interesting effect when combined with the Arnold Skin shader which requires normals to be facing outwards. I used the default Skin settings except I increased the radius multiplier to get a softer ‘jelly’ look to the SSS and increased the Shallow Scatter to 1.