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Tag: guide

Season 01 – Episode 20 – Leg Guide pt2

Published by Raffaele on 3 March, 2018

Finishing the Guide, Notes on Constraints

Like a few episodes ago I feel this episode, while still with a clear main theme of the Guide, needs an introduction.

I have, in the past, redone streams when I thought they weren’t up to par. In this case I decided not to (redo it), because I don’t feel it’s a “bad one”.
The first half is without hitches and we go about our business of analyzing where we stand, recapping, and setting things up.
Somewhere in the second half being indecisive about how to tackle the framing of the knee buffer, I chased my tail around a bit while looking at options, and on some fairly simple mistakes (largely involving the aim constraints).

The episode is still worth watching through, but it feels like I have been hand waving the graph cycle subject for too long so that the second part of the episode might be confusing to a good slice of the audience.

Lastly, at the very end, in the last few minutes before wrapping up, I explain something about containers (assets) in Maya, how they interact with the node editor, and why you might find that opening one of the scenes I share might show you a node editor with no connections despite the rig working fine.

So, with all that in mind I decided to do a special intro to explain how constrain cycles work, why they exist, what other cycles you might encounter and what their consequences are as well as how to solve them.

Thanks for reading, and enjoy the episode,

Intro and Constraints

Episode 20

Season 01 – Episode 19 – Leg Guide pt1

Published by Raffaele on 1 March, 2018

Guiding the Leg Proper

Part one of I’m not entirely sure how many episodes where we will finish the guide and set up for the leg component proper.

There isn’t anything specific about the episode I feel needs outlining. We have some work ahead of us to make the full rig configurable by guide and finished, and this is one of those sessions of honest work to get there.
I wouldn’t call it boring, I actually quite enjoyed streaming it and am looking forward to the next one or two we’ll need to finish this, but it’s one largely about keeping the graph in check while nodelling new parts on.

Enjoy,

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 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,