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Month: April 2018

Season 01 – Episode 32 – Maths: Mirroring Transforms, Components: Modularising

Published by Raffaele on 6 April, 2018

Maths: Mirroring Transforms
Components: Modularisation

A little bit of an odd episode as it treats two completely different and unrelated subjects.

In the first half we go over modularising components, gotchas, procedure, some tricks on how to manage it with pure vanilla Maya and so on. Not bad going.

As the next step after that will be mirroring components I thought it would be beneficial to actually explain what reflection (handedness inversion) means in mathematical terms, and show what it looks like with Maya transforms.

The QnA indulges on a scaling related question too in the context of deformation.

It had been a while since we did a math video or a Maya workflow one, so it was kind of cool to get to treat both in one session.

Enjoy,

Season 01 – Episode 31 – Finished Components

Published by Raffaele on 5 April, 2018

All Components, Finished!

Finished! Yes, with today we finally have our first pass on all components ready to go.

Time to move on to modularisation, import/export and finally component symmetry.

Not a lot to add to that, this is a straight forward, busy and fruitful nodelling stream. We fixed and extended leg and foot components to properly account for offsets and to fully respond to the guiding/deguiding process.

The script used during the stream is still the one we worked on in the previous episode, and it can be found here.

Enjoy,

Season 01 – Episode 30 – Finished Guiding Tool

Published by Raffaele on 4 April, 2018

Finished, Working Guiding Tool

This episode we come to a fully working, finished Guiding Tool capable of swapping guide/control graph states, as well as clean out DG and DAG items to completely remove the guide yielding a finished component ready to hand out.

Towards the very end we also go into how stretchy IK could be added to our leg component. We’ll probably do add it ourselves in the future, so if you’re after some homework it might not be a bad way to go, as you will eventually be able to compare your implementation with the stream’s.

Stretchy IK ending aside: This is honest work investigating the components, testing and extending the tool, and applying fixes as needed when the tool evidences some previously unaddressed issue in the leg component.

It’s a relaxed stream with an easy pace and I kinda like how it went; particularly the fact it came to a clean conclusion bang on time.

We’re now ready to move on to finishing the foot component to acknowledge the foot offset from FK/IK controls, and we have one minor fix left for the leg guide to properly preserve the offset connection with the hip, and then we’ll be good to export and symmetrize the leg and finally bind.
The fruit of all our efforts is finally in sight!

All code can be found on github labelled by the day, as usual.

Enjoy,