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Check out the Animation Lounge! · 1721 days ago

A budding new forum, the Animation Lounge is off to a great and active start. Could this be what cgchar used to be? I surely hope so and I’ll be checking in and doing my part to help and so should you!

Oh and animators they have started a very nice collection of free rigs (and not just mine =D ) definatly worth a look if you want to mix things up a bit.

Ian

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Sharing Attributes - It's possible!! · 1745 days ago

Ever wanted an attribute in two places, that would act as one. They’d have one animation curve shared between them and one shared output that you could feed off somewhere else. I’m not talking about adding the attribute to both and adding them together to get a result cause that’s just nasty to maintain. Rather a solution that if you alter the attribute to 3 here it’s changed to 3 there and can be used to drive a connection over there as 3 just like that.

Continue Reading!

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Maya Hotkeys: WOS and XRAY · 1747 days ago

Thus begins a new series on maya hotkeys as I am consistently asked. Thanks goes out to Dan for the inspirational aim message!

So some background for new users. How to create a custom hotkey:


1. Open the hotkey editor ( window > settings > hotkey )
2. Select the user category from the left hand side of the UI.
3. Press New
4. Enter information into fields
5. Press Accept
6. Select the new user command in the center of the UI and assign the hotkey as per norm.

Okay, now some examples: WOS (Wires on Shaded):

proc ToggleWiresOnShaded (){

     string $panelFocused = `getPanel -wf`;
     string $isWired = `modelEditor -q -wos $panelFocused`;
     if($isWired) modelEditor -edit -wos 0 $panelFocused;
     else modelEditor -edit -wos 1 $panelFocused;
}
ToggleWiresOnShaded;

Next example: Xray

Now given the flag for xray is -xray can you figure out how to apply the code above to the find a working solution?

See the answer!

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New Category: Rigging Related · 1748 days ago

I’ve added a new category to the right menu: Rigging Related to filter out all the non rigging stuff. Hopefully that helps people interested in learning find what they are looking for faster.

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New spline Ik + fk subsystem · 1748 days ago

Just finished working on a new spline ik + fk subsystem for the rigging platform.

You can play with it on the recently released taxi rig. But I’ll take a brief second to talk about the inner workings for the td crowd.

K so for a given chain of joints I make 2 new chains, one a duplicate. The other a duplicate with stacked joints eg JointA > JointB becomes JointA_guide > JointA > JointB_guide > JointB.

The _guides take translation/rotation from the duplicated chain that we run our normal spline ik system on. The child joints then add rotation/scale before feeding back to the bind chain.

Not exactly as elegant as I might wish (sorry game houses it’s a bit heavy on the transforms still) but for shorts/film what’s better than being able to take a pass with splineIk controls then add some overlap/breaking of joints in fk.

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