r/Maya • u/IntroductionNo3912 • Jul 16 '26
Plugin Google GNM Head is now open source - Maya plugin next?
Google GNM Head is now open source and a Blender addon has already been released. Anyone interested in integrating GNM Head into Autodesk Maya?
20
14
u/1_BigDuckEnergy Jul 16 '26
Can anyone explain the goal of this? I have been a facial rigger for 20+ years and this seems like a good demo with little practical use.
It might be useful as a modeling tool, but it seem like it is just a bunch of adaptive blendshapes to tweak head designs, but pretty limited.
Animation controls seem useless.... not animator could work with this.
Again, seems like a very interesting school project, but does it have in use in a real production?
5
u/IntroductionNo3912 Jul 16 '26
you are not wrong. this was done in MEL back in 2004. However this is an advancement on previous attempts and it is still pretty useless unless you need a crowd of secondary characters.
Please anyone correct me if I am wrong
2
u/1_BigDuckEnergy Jul 16 '26
I think it can be of use when making facial variations for background characters, however, the range of facial expressions almost non existent...
1
u/IntroductionNo3912 Jul 16 '26
yeah it is very limited. not a good thing specially when the style you are after depends on exaggeration.
2
u/Bridge-Greedy everything is triangles Jul 18 '26
I am confused as well - the topo is 3d Scanstore I checked the UVs and vert order. I guess they just trained on that data and it will be something like a more advanced arkit face detection/wrapper. idk.
13
u/ikerclon Character Tech Artist @ Google | 20+ years experience Jul 16 '26
I’m a part of the team that released GNM, working at Google as Technical Artist. The main purpose of these type of datasets is to be used in research. However, internally we use GNM in production as well to generate, among other things, synthetic data to train perception models for AndroidXR.
At its current state, as you mentioned, using them in animated projects is a little bit clunky because the expression components/blendshapes are not directly correlated to any useful semantics. Meaning that there’s not “open jaw”, “raise left eyebrow”, “flare the right nostril” one-to-one controls. By using the Semantic Sampler packaged in the release you can get full expressions (“happiness”, etc), that then you can bake and slice to get meaningful FACS-like components.
I also showcased this as an example of what one can do on top of the existing data by painting a few vertex groups/maps and using them to filter identity blendshapes.
1
2
u/KrikDai Jul 17 '26
Is there any image prediction and reconstruction model based on this 3d base model? kind like DECA, EMOCA, Spectre, MICA (They are based on flame 3d base model)
1
1
u/Sulot00 Jul 17 '26
Looks like if it is modular for a procedurally based faces up could have it queue up one click phonemes etc thats thresholds or extremes were based on proportions, based on the demo from ikerclon, but nothing stylized. Something that could be ai or procedurally driven probably
•
u/AutoModerator Jul 16 '26
You're invited to join the community discord for /r/maya users! https://discord.gg/FuN5u8MfMz
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.