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(This post was mainly inspired by email conversations about the possible role of the ACS in BCS setups.)

If you are new to the BCS (and the ACS), I'd suggest not to worry about the ACS at first. Using the BCS together with the ACS is adding another layer of abstraction.

Basically, the BCS is used for combination-sculpting of shapes, while the ACS is just used to do sort of combination-sculpting on simple float attributes. You could do quite primitive combination-sculpting with a Maya blendShape node plus an ACS setup, but the BCS has the complete feature set for this purpose (e.g. left-right separation, easy modeling of shapes, etc.).

After working with the BCS for some time, however, you might notice that certain shapes can be replaced by much simpler means than doing a combination shape or tweakMixing. If all you need is controlling the mix of the weights' values (as opposed to their mixed shape), you can put an ACS setup on top of the BCS, thus creating another layer of combination sculpting. The pipeline would be:

    animated attrs -> ACS -> BCS -> visible shape

After more than four years without any posts, I guess it is time for some updates. First of all, my tools (including the BCS) are still actively supported and will also be in the future.

The lack of new projects and updates for my scripts is due to me being in the middle of studying physics here at the University of Hanover. I recently got my Bachelors degree and now I'm heading for the Master. For those interested, my thesis was about the motion of charged/uncharged particles in a five dimensional Reissner-Nordström-(anti-)de Sitter background, i.e. in presence of a charged, non-rotating black hole, including effects of a cosmological constant :D

As mentioned, I plan to continue my studies but I still hope to be able to do a bit more development on the BCS and other projects in the future. I also intend to post a little bit more often here on my site, but I wont promise anything. Future posts might deal with certain less understood aspects of the BCS and other tools, such as WeightPositionGroups or the relation to and integration with the ACS.

We're planning to (finally) build a website for our company STARGRAV GmbH. As soon as it is ready, the BCS will be distributed through the company's site. You don't have to worry, though, as the BCS will remain free for personal use.

Until then, please contact me if you're interested in a copy of the BCS for personal or testing purposes (daniel@dpk.stargrav.com).

I've finally uploaded the updated version of the BCS. The previously published version has been 1.0.8, to which version 1.1.3 adds a few small new features and fixes several bugs. Among them are UI problems mostly on Linux. The version history (in the description and readme) contains a list of all the changes.

Note that the manual is in the process of getting a rewrite. Especially the quick start, now to be found in Getting Started, and several other chapters have been or will be completely redesigned. Since the old manual contained some information that hasn't yet been merged into the new, it can still be found in the "old-docs" folder of the current download.

The plugin is now available for both Windows and Linux for Maya 6.5, 7.0, and 8.5.

Similar as in the BCS, I've decided to change the ACS license so that it remains free for non-commercial use, but requires a separate license to be obtained when used for commercial purposes. This was necessary in order to protect the basic ideas behind the BCS, which are to a certain extent also part of the ACS.