Nyeng!

For the past couple weeks, my main goal has been to get the spine & neck portion of my rigging tool updated. Instead, I ended up working on utilities to make the tasks easier. And since these utilities could be re-used elsewhere, I figure it’d be a good idea to make them easier to use -
One thing I’m not looking forward to – having to go back and update my arm script…

A stressful year is finally coming to a close, and I’m starting 2012 much as I did 2011 – blissfully far away from Miami, FL. While I’m sad to not be working in-house with the crew at MoonSpider anymore, I just could not get out of Miami fast enough.

For the new year, one of my resolutions is to get through as much of my to-do list as possible, starting with various drawings and mel scripts. I’ve got a good head start on some of the new images over on Deviant Art, and over the past couple of days I’ve been working on some small mel utilities.  Once I’m out of those, I’ll have to get back to the big ones – my character-rigging tools…

If I’m to animate them, Mary and Daisy both are in need of some cleaning up.

With Daisy, the bulk of the changes are technical. Her rig needs to be cleaned up or replaced, clothes and hair should be set up to use dynamics, etc. There were some changes to her mesh a while back, but those are relatively minor.

Mary, on the other hand, will be a bit more extensive. The first thing I’ve addressed so far is an old one – the length of her legs. They were too long compared to the rest of her body, but using Daisy as a measurement made it clearer – if Daisy is 3’6″, then the old Mary is roughly 6’3″. The height of this new model is closer to 5’8″, and could probably go an inch or 3 shorter.

Her fingers were one area where attempting to match my drawing style was a bad idea. They ended up being too sausage-like. Her new fingers are more naturally shaped, with better (and clearer) joint proportions.

Her spine was another major issue. The curvature of her default pose was too strong, which was fine if she ever needed to arc her back even more, but if she bent forward, getting decent deformation was impossible.  Hopefully having her stand straight by default will fix these problems.

Her breasts will also need to be toned down. I don’t know when exactly they got as big as they are now, but I’d like to take them back down to their original size. One busty character (Daisy) is enough.  Whether I do this through modeling, or through rigging, I haven’t decided yet.  Either way, I’ll also have to do something about the “anti-gravity” pose, if only so I won’t have to explain it any more…

When I’ll be done with her is another question that I don’t have an answer for.  Right now, a higher priority will be finishing my rigging tool, and maybe implementing some of the more recent tricks I’ve picked up.  Once that’s out of the way, I think it’d be much better to try it out on a new character.

I’ve had this idea for a while, and finally got around to drawing it –

This idea hit me when mel script finally started to make sense. Even if I didn’t know the commands, suddenly I knew how a script should flow. Sometimes I would go to sleep frustrated that I couldn’t get a tool to work, and by morning I’d have the problem solved. More recently, I had to pull my car over on the Florida Turnpike, just so I could scribble some notes. It’s typically a 4-hour drive from Miami to Orlando, and the script I’d come up with was something I didn’t want to keep in my head the whole time.

Now that I’m making progress in Mel, I’ve been giving Python a more serious look. I was surprised to find that it’s not that different. The difference in syntax is minor, but the way the code flows is more or less the same. Python may look better on a resume, but for now I don’t see much advantage to scripting in one versus the other. If I decide to delve into Maya’s api, then that would be a different story…

I didn’t expect this one to be easy, but I also didn’t expect it to be as complex as it ended up being.  With so much uncertainty about how hurricane Irene would affect Miami, or especially Key Biscayne,  my boss gave everyone a long weekend.  I ended up using much of the time to get another important part of my rigging tool in place – a parent-space setup and switching utility.

The bulk of the setup tool didn’t take long to write, but once I realized I’d made a mistake, fixing it was…  a little frustrating.  Initially, the setup worked in a straight-forward way – using condition nodes to set the constraint weights when the parent attribute is changed.   After writing the procedure, I decided to get out of Miami for the weekend, and drive up to Orlando.  Not because of the storm, but because I really don’t like spending any more time in Miami than I have to.  Shortly after I got on the highway, I realized that if I wanted an object to switch parents while keeping its current position and orientation, condition nodes not only wouldn’t be enough, they couldn’t be used at all.  The solution came to me rather quickly, but I had to wait an hour or so before I pull into a rest stop to write down the ideas.  It’d be another 3 hours before I could try to update the script.

Another weekend of coding, and the arms portion of my rig tool is now maybe half-finished.  But at least what is there is working.  Here’s a video showing off some of the progress, along with some of the smaller procedures the tool uses -

More progress on the rigging tool – more options (and organization) for the arms tab, and a good start on arm rig procedure.

…and by “good start” I mean baby-steps.  It brands the group node with the information from the UI, and creates the IK & FK control chains.

I’m finally making some progress on my own rigging tool -

Currently it can rig the spine and neck with FK… and not much else.   Writing the UI and and background utilities seems to take up more time that the actually rig procedures.