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Author: Raffaele

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,

Season 01 – Episode 29 – Maya Parallel Evaluation

Published by Raffaele on 23 March, 2018

Maya’s Graph Part 2, Parallel Evaluation

This episode we conclude the presentation of Maya’s evaluation models by going over parallel evaluation.

We explain how it works, what nodes operate in which way, and the fundamentals to make the best of your graph’s layout to ensure you keep all cores of your CPU busy.

I haven’t seen this discussed extensively anywhere else, so there are good chances you’ll find it useful.

During the Stream I mention a particularly important document about Maya’s graph, so here’s the link to Autodesk’s official page

Enjoy,

Season 01 – Episode 28 – Maya Evaluation Graph Explained

Published by Raffaele on 21 March, 2018

Maya’s Dependency Graph Demystified

With the scripting saga finally over we take a good look at how Maya’s DG (Dependency Graph) evaluation model works.

We introduce evaluation graphs in general, the concepts of push and pull, data vs evaluation, and then we move into more Maya specific territory.

Maya’s MDataBlock, compute(), Plugs and dirty state and all that goodness.

I do wish I had switched up to our own rig to show a more complex graph somewhere in the last third, but hopefully the simplicity of the example and the discussion will still get the point across even for the more complex scenarios. We will, no doubt, have a chance to revisit the subject again soon enough when we’ll be discussing profiling and performance.

During the Stream I mention a particularly important document about Maya’s graph, so here’s the link to Autodesk’s official page

In the end we also introduce some of the peculiarities and fundamentals of how the model behind the new multi-threaded evaluation looks like.

Enjoy,

Season 01 – Chill Session 01 – Clean Up episode 27 scene

Published by Raffaele on 17 March, 2018

Scene Clean Up betrween episodes 27 and 28

Clean Up Work between episodes 27 and 28.

Not much more than that to be said.
It’s the periodic clean up work before sharing a large scene I would normally do off stream, but decided to share this time.

I intentionally refrained from modifying or adding behavior to the components, that’s something I would do in an official stream, but you might still like it for a light listening/watching.

The important bit is the scene, which is now available in the resources page

Enjoy,

Season 01 – Episode 27 – Scripting, Finished Guide/Control Toggle

Published by Raffaele on 16 March, 2018

Scripting Component Management, pt6, Finished Guide/Control Toggle

The end of the scripting saga of Season 1!

The scene is still the same from the previous days and it’s available from the resources page.

Don’t be afraid if you’re not interested in programming. Or maybe not up to scratch on your scripting to follow the details.
This will NOT be necessary to follow the stream once we’ll resume non programming work.
You will be able to copy and paste what I wrote and use it if your rig conventions are close enough to the ones we use on stream.

As always the “code” is available on a Public Repository on Github as linked here.

This episode we finish covering all cases in the first two thirds, more or less, of the video. Once you’ll get to me meandering about the rig, somewhere around the 40th minute, you will have seen all the goodness, the rest is just entertainment.

Also worth noting that at the very end of the stream I was surprised that our cleaned up Leg Component Guide wouldn’t respond as expected, so I announced I would have left it for another day. Of course the moment I stopped recording I realized I had left some prototype casing where I forced the swap case in, and therefore the script would run the wrong case.
The code available on the repository does not have the issue. If you watch the video it will become pretty obvious then what I’m talking about.

Enjoy,