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Tag: components

Season 01 – Episode 43, 44, 45 – Bindings and Deformation

Bindings, Deformation, and More!

Hi all,

Cataloguing three episodes at once is a first for me, but these episodes are also somewhat particular.

On 43 I set off to clean things up, test them, and save a scene that I could share. Little did I know I fell into old habits, and as I consider coarse deformation necessary for testing I started laying out a skeleton. It’s at that point that I realized I had never really discussed how I formalize/compartmentalize deformation, let alone the notion of Bindings.

If you watch 43 first, the first few minutes promise that it will be a chill-out stream, but I was wrong, and things escalate quickly into explaining division of responsibilities for deformation.
While episode 43 was a rabbit-hole, but still satisfying, I decided to do another episode giving the subject the introduction it deserves as well as introduce some of the necessary standards in our rig, that would be episode 44.
By the end of 44 I had done enough, I feel, to clarify what bindings are and how I rationalize deformation, but still had work to do and practices/standards I wanted to discuss; enter episode 45, where the skeleton is finished and the scene finally cleaned up.

The subject sneaked up on me, and I regret not having planned for it, but only because I blew the introductions. The material itself I believe to be important, and I think the episodes did come together in the end and I’m glad I got to the subject now and had three consecutive days to treat it.

I do make a recommendation in episode 44 that I will repeat here:
It might be best if you watch the first twenty or so minutes of Episode 44 first, and then watch episode 43 and on from there.
I don’t think the material is ruined or incomprehensible without that order, but the theory at the beginning of 44 makes 43 come together better.

Because this is a lot of hours of video I’m not going to break down the episodes specifically, there’s a lot in there from the Bindings/Deformation formalities to career advice to the audience.

So, with all that said, here’s the three episodes back to back.

Enjoy!

Season 1, Episode 43

Season 1, Episode 44

Season 1, Episode 45

Season 01 – Episode 42 – Finished Puppet

We Finished the Puppet!

And with this we have the answer to everything puppet, which pleases me a lot given this was episode number 42 🙂

Beside a small amount of chasing one’s own tail in the middle to add a feature that had already been added this was a very good stream for me.

Lots got done in the first hour
We added proper negative scaling consideration in the FK ankle. We re-inspected various elements and then mirrored the foot and finally cleaned up everything and relaxed the IK distance constraints a bit.

All of this gets us to a full, finished puppet and get the scene in state that can be finally shared with the audience again (I will edit this post then tweet as soon as I have that available).

There’s also a good 10 minutes of answer to a question asked on Twitter about live guides vs build scripts that might be worth it for some.

Enjoy!

Season 01 – Episode 41 – Fixing and Mirroring Components

Fixing and Mirroring Components

Title kind of says it all, really.

In a belated follow-up to the investigations and explanations about the maths behind signing angles we fix the only obvious issue that was left with the foot and put our guides to the test by mirroring the now potentially finished components.

Only one bugfix left for the leg FK, if everything goes well, to do in the next stream and then the rig should finally be complete for sharing.

Season 01 – Episode 38 – Fitting the Rig to Geometry, Re-acquisition

Fitting the Rig to Geometry

I announced this episode as a chill stream, but it accidentally came out quite well paced (at least in my opinion.) Always accidentally it’s the last day of the year and the episode ended up being a recap of everything we did during the year, which I also find fitting (no pun intended).

Initially I just wanted to reacquaint myself and the audience with the rig we’d been working on for so long, and I thought that fitting it to some geometry to put it to the test would have been a good way to go about it.
We did do that, in the end, but the outcome is an inspection and a summary of all components as well as a successful fit of the guides lining up everything to the geometry, and the first chunk of work on a scene to be shared done.

Leg Global, Godnode and Foot are all in good shape now, and next stream we should be able to do the leg, call it a wrap on the mehcanics (unless some bug or other rears its ugly head) and finally move on actually binding to the geo.

Whether you’ve been following all along and took a long break with me, or you’re bumping into this while binging on the whole season after it got done weeks or months away from me writing, I think it’s been a worthwhile episode.

Enjoy,

Season 01 – Episode 37 – Modular Components, Reassembling the Rig

Modular Components and Rig Assembly

I’ve talked about components being modular before and I’ve shown the I/O process in the past, but this time around we do it for real.

There isn’t anything specific that’s new, but I did kind of like how it went and I would recommend watching it. It will take you through the whole process of componentisation and assembly well enough.

There’s a bit of everything in it, Maya bugs, scripting, tiny amount of nodelling, Q/C, conforming, the actual I/O of the components…
All in all I feel it came out well paced and it covers a good chunk of ground in one hour.

To be a bit more specific: This is where we take all of our components and we push them through the I/O process (to file and from file) both for Q/C (Quality Control) as well as to actually re-assemble a full rig.

In the process I list a couple gotchas with containers, find a non-bug, and we write a trivial renaming script (more for variety than anything). All the work gets done on time, and we fix the last couple dirty bits in our components, which turned out to be bug-free, and only in need of some conforming.

QnA, the last dozen minutes or so, is mostly me rambling about rig standards, instrumenting rigs, and pipelines at scale and not.

As usual the code is available on GitHub in the didactic section but it really isn’t anything much.

Enjoy,