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

Published by Raffaele on 30 June, 2018

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,

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,

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,

Season 01 – Episode 25 – Scripting, Swapping Plugs

Published by Raffaele on 13 March, 2018

Scripting Component Management, pt4, Swapping Plugs

More scripting, and specifically more on Plugs in Maya and the finishing stretch before our guide/control swap(MPlugs in the API).

I mention homework at the very end. If you want to use my scene 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.

This a “getting things done” kind of day, with some meandering thoughts in the end on how to manage development in the face of branching possibilities.

Enjoy,