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Tag: maya

Season 01 – Episode 24 – Scripting, Managing Plugs

Published by Raffaele on 9 March, 2018

Scripting Component Management, pt3, Maya Plugs Gotchas and Retrieval

More scripting, and specifically lots on plugs in Maya (MPlugs in the API).

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.

This episode we dig up the guide of the leg global component and refactor and simplify some connections with the consideration of the guiding/de-guiding automation needing a test bed.

We made good progress on the script front too and we should now have all we need for the final recipe of the guide swap.

Some insider knowledge on gotchas and managing plugs came up as well.

Enjoy,

Season 01 – Episode 23 – Scripting, Retrieving Container Items

Published by Raffaele on 8 March, 2018

Scripting Component Management, pt2, Retrieving from Containers

Don’t be afraid if you’re not interested. 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 my previous post 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 made some progress on our component instrumentation and we can now reliably retrieve interesting objects and their relationship to our components starting from a simple selection.

Enjoy,

Season 01 – Episode 22 – Scripting, Instrumenting Containers

Published by Raffaele on 7 March, 2018

Scripting Component Management, pt1, Instrumenting Containers

Following popular vote Scripting Sessions start again!

Don’t be afraid if you’re not interested. 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.

I do, however, recommend that you try and practice, even if you’re unfamiliar with Python or OpenMaya, and need to use other means to obtain similar results.
Even if you’re completely new to programming and boil the experience down to copying and pasting then running the stuff I will be sharing. There is great mileage to be had in exploring interacting with the Maya client through means other than the UI.

Since we’ll be moving predominantly on the scripting front for a few streams I won’t be posting every bit of text, but all of it will be promptly made available on my Public Repository on Github as linked here.

We start by diving into some exploratory work to learn how to deal with containers through OpenMaya, and how high level concepts such as assets can be mapped to simple graph operations.

Our long term goal is to make the guiding and de-guiding process much, much easier than if we had to manage it manually.

Enjoy,

Season 01 – Episode 21 – Kinesiology and Finished Guided Leg

Published by Raffaele on 5 March, 2018

Intro to Limb Kinesiology, Fixing the Foot, Finishing the Leg

If nothing else, make sure you at least watch the video from 45m and on for an introduction to Kinesiology.
The rest is a fairly clean and straight forward bit of nodelling that brings the whole leg back together and gets us a fully guided component

Not a lot to add to the above.
We take stock of the work we had left behind, “fix” the foot, clean some odd spots, and call it a day with a fully functioning guidable leg by the 45th minute.

Since there was time to spare, and a good question in chat, I decided to ramble on for another 15 minutes about the kinesiology of limbs and how it relates to twist and joint behavior, which hopefully you will find interesting.

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