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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 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 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,

Season 01 – Episode 26 – Scripting, Working DeGuiding

Published by Raffaele on 14 March, 2018

Scripting Component Management, pt5, Working DeGuiding

We finally have a working DeGuiding for our first case.

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 should still check a couple posts ago for more thoughts on that, and scripting in general, before you give up on the subject.

As before the “code” is available on my Public Repository on Github as linked here.

We now seem to have everything working and we successfully addressed our first of four cases for DeGuiding any component. Success and the end of the scripting saga for this season seems now within reach!

Enjoy,