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Author: Raffaele

Season 01 – Episode 16 – Maya Attributes Primer, FKoverIK set up

Published by Raffaele on 20 February, 2018

Attributes Primer, FKoverIK

We provide a quick primer on Maya attributes and how to form compound attributes, which will be very important for our guide clean up process, and then show how to do an FKoverIK set up which we’ll use to simplify the guide.

A very simple script is used during the stream. As usual it’s provided in this post, and I will eventually add it to the GitHub repository.

All new episode now free of low frequency hum in the audio!
Enjoy,

 

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from maya.api import OpenMaya as om2
sel = om2.MGlobal.getActiveSelectionList()
mob = sel.getDependNode(0)
 
fn_cAttr = om2.MFnCompoundAttribute()
fn_mAttr = om2.MFnMessageAttribute()
 
c_attr = fn_cAttr.create("toSwap", "toSwap")
fn_cAttr.array = True
 
m_attr1 = fn_mAttr.create("originalConnection", "originalConnection")
m_attr2 = fn_mAttr.create("guidedConnection", "guidedConnection")
 
fn_cAttr.addChild(m_attr1)
fn_cAttr.addChild(m_attr2)
 
fn_dep = om2.MFnDependencyNode(mob)
fn_dep.addAttribute(c_attr)

Season 01 – Episode 15 – Component Encapsulation, Clean up

Published by Raffaele on 16 February, 2018

Rig Component Encapsulation and Clean up

First let me apologise for the audio. Only after the stream I realised how present the low hum is, and there isn’t a lot I can do about it after the fact. I figured out what it is and should be able to suppress it in the future.

As for the contents of the video itself there isn’t a whole lot to say. We perform some much needed house cleaning and start properly encapsulating into containers the various parts of the rig.

Enjoy,

Season 01 – Episode 14 – Adding FK to IK Blending

Published by Raffaele on 15 February, 2018

Blending FK and IK in the leg component

I do mention this early in the stream, but just to re-iterate the point: If you watch videos as they come out you might be surprised to find episode 14 going live and no episode 13 up yet.

First: Don’t panic! You can watch this and it won’t be a problem to keep up if you’re up to 12. What we did in 13 is largely theory, which isn’t required for any other episode as it was pretty philosophical, and on the practical front we only fixed a few connections and names in the rig.
By downloading the scene from the resources page you can easily catch up to it, as well as dissect the fixed asst.

The reason it didn’t go up right away after I finished the stream is that it’s a subject I’m particularly fond of and I feel I need to either edit it, or at least release it with an intro and (possibly) an errata. I should be able to get to it during the coming weekend.

If you read/watch these a few days or more late you will have seen 13 up and all will be well.

Getting to the point though: This stream we added FK to the leg and showed how to trivially blend between FK and IK as well as discussed how we could cut down and compress the graph even further in the near future.
There isn’t really much in the way of required knowledge, but if you haven’t followed, or don’t remember, the theory from the Pilot Season episodes the Matrix Maths one is worth a watch as we do make use of matrix mult again.

Enjoy,

Season 01 – Episode 11 – Component Live Guide

Published by Raffaele on 26 January, 2018

Component Live Guide

I have to admit this stream came out better than I expected. I quite like what it came to and the subject, Live Guide, is important to me.

The long story short about it is that we want to add guides to our components, but instead of the run-once or build approach we show how to create Live, dynamic Guide layers that can tweak a built component on the fly.

During the Stream, in a discussion about visualising simple data in Maya, I mentioned Cesar Saez’s work, You can find it here:
http://www.cesarsaez.me/2016/07/mscreen.html

On a related note: Someone else mentioned something and in context it sounded like it was a tool/plugin (MUIDrawManager). I only realised later, when I my brain was less crowded by talking about what I was doing, that they were referring to the Maya API object dealing with view draw. Nothing there that you won’t get from your Maya SDK Documentation.

Enjoy,

Season 01 – Episode 10 – IK UpVector and Pop Limit

Published by Raffaele on 25 January, 2018

IK UpVector and Pop Limit

We explain how to introduce an UpVector in our custom IK solver. Following that we take a look at the numbers and reasons behind the classic IK over extension “pop”.

Some nodelling, some applied maths, some maths theory…
It’s a slow but, hopefully, interesting mixed bag this episode

Enjoy,