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Category: Video Archives

Season 01 – Episode 34 – Everything Else About Mirroring

Published by Raffaele on 24 June, 2018

Mirroring Components, Everything Else

Different format than usual for this episode!

There was a good chunk of work that would be repetitive and boring to do on-stream as nodelling, so unlike in any previous episode I decided to do it off-stream and then bring the rig up to comment on why and how it was done and the underpinning fundamentals.

This is meant to compress the time to finish the rig a bit and offer a more concise episode.

I like how it came out and it seems to have been well received, so it might happen again, albeit probably not this season since the work remaining should generally speaking be new and/or interesting to see through its execution.

So, to make a long story short: This video goes over everything about mirroring components that is required to get a fully reflected component for the leg and shows the rig in action.

I recommend downloading the corresponding ep34 scene from the download section to follow along by exploring the scene as I go over it.
It can be found here as usual.

Enjoy,

Season 01 – Episode 33 – Mirroring Leg Component

Published by Raffaele on 2 May, 2018

Mirroring Components

This episode we build on the theory and waffling of the previous two and (successfully) get onto Mirroring the Leg Component.

There’s a bit of everything coming up as needed: For the most part it pulls together elements from all over, especially the previous episode, until the leg has a functional handedness switch doing all the expected work.

Over the next few episodes we’ll extend this past the boundaries of the leg, the global and foot, and that should be the end of the rigging part of the season,

Enjoy,

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,