Rigging Assistant MEL App
My latest plan in the works? A rigging assistant app.
For the short film that my team has been working on (“Stoplight”), I have been tasked with rigging. Because I have done some rigging in the past and have continued to research it a lot, the task is fun in a way rather than daunting. The project requires somewhat non-traditional rigs since it has non-humanoid characters in it, so I have needed to figure out new and different ways to do things. It has certainly stretched me, but has been a great experience.
In any case, one thought that keeps recurring to me as I rig is that there are a lot of things in rigging that take up a reasonable amount of time, but are purely mechanical processes. For example, the node hierarchy of the rig is exactly the same from rig to rig, with all of the rigs I’ve done so far, (mainNode01, which breaks in to globalControl01, geo01, blendShapes01, extraNodes01, and under globalControl01 we have more nodes, etc etc etc.) The problem is that the process of setting up this node hierarchy requires absolutely no creativity, yet takes up a fair chunk of time. And that is not the only part of the rigging process in which that is the issue.
So I thought to myself, what if I had a MEL or Python-based rigging assistant that would take care of all of these little processes for me? It would save a ton of time!
I am familiar with Apps such as the Setup Machine by Anzovin Studio, but this is not the sort of thing that I am looking for. You see, I still want to have complete control over everything I do in the rigging process. The idea is not to have an app that builds the rig for me; I only want it to take care of the tedious processes that are merely a matter of repetition and procedure.
So, I began working on my Rigging Assistant yesterday, and have the GUI set up so far. Unfortunately the intense schedule that my classes keep me on make it hard to devote a huge amount of my time to extracurricular activities such as this, but Easter Break (which I just started) should give me just the time I need!
The Rigging Assistant is basically a little toolbox that you will have open with buttons to automate processes as you require them. I wish I could include a screen shot but I am working on my netbook at the moment which affords limited options when it comes to modeling and design. When I get back to my room later I will try to remember to post a few images. Anyways, as far as features of this Assistant, I am adding them as I think of them, but so far I have thought of a few of the following ideas:
Create Node
This is probably the biggest time saver that I have thought of yet. This automation script will set up the node hierarchy of the rig for me, so that I don’t have to waste the first 5 or 10 minutes setting up and grouping groups.
Mirror AND Rename
Call me lazy, but sometimes I wish I didn’t have to click two buttons when I could just be clicking one. Yes, Maya has a “Mirror Joints,” and yes Maya has a “Search and Replace Names.” But what if I just want to click one button and have it all done for me? With my naming convention I always have a _l_ or a _r_ in my joints to denote the side of the body that they are on. Well, when I mirror my joints I of course need to rename that part of their names so that it matches with the new side of the body. In addition, I always have a 01 at the end of my node names. The duplication gives me 02′s all over the place. So those need to be renamed too. So, this handy dandy button will mirror my selected joints, and do all of that renaming for me. A minute or two saved!
Snapping
Something that I inevitably need when I am rigging is either a true translation snap or a true orient snap. I traditional technique is to use either a point constraint or an orient constraint to accomplish this, and to simply delete the constraint after you have snapped it. Well, selecting and deleting the constraint easily eats up 15 or 20 seconds of my time! Unacceptable! What if there was just a button that I could press, and it would snap using the constraint, then automatically delete the constraint for me? Great! That is what these buttons will do. At this point I am planning to have a Location(Translation) Snap, An Orientation Snap, and a Complete Snap(both). This will be both handy and dandy for me!
The Usual Needs
There are those things that I want to have automated for me, but there are also things that I use all the time that I just want a button for. After all, I use things like the point and parent constraint like crazy, why should those functions be overlooked? My rigging assistant will also have buttons for all of the usual functions. I just spent an hour or so last night looking through all the .xpm icon filenames to find the ones that I will need for my assistant. It will be great.
And that’s all I have so far. I am going to be hitting up the rigging more this weekend, and I am sure that as I work I will think of more things to add to my assistant. I’m excited about the time I will save for the next rig I do!!
In Christ,
Pete
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The Giant Tongue!
Over the last couple weeks I worked on and off on a piece for CG Society’s latest CG Challenge. The topic for the Challenge was “B Movie,” and because this contest was also being used as a project for my Digital Illustration class I was assigned some material to use as a sort of starting point. I was given the poster for the movie “The Giant Behemoth,” and the conditions were that I had to keep the same idea as what was on the original poster. In addition, I was required to keep the words “The Giant” in the title, but was allowed to replace “Behemoth” with anything. After much deliberation and inspiration from friends and a professor, I ended up with “The Giant Tongue.” You can take a look at the original poster as well as my finished piece below.
Original Poster:
My Finished Piece:
In Christ,
Pete
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Camera Mapping
Lately I have been really interested in camera mapping. It seems like it keeps cropping up everywhere, so I am gonna need to dive in soon and really figure it out. I was on Vimeo this afternoon just sort of browsing camera mapping stuff, and found this. It’s very well done, and just got me all the more excited to try this stuff out myself.
-Pete
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Great Photoshop “Making Of”
This is a great Photoshop “Making of” video that a Designer who spoke in one of my classes posted. He made the Basketball and other various pieces of the artwork in Modo (Which he does not cover in this video), but he does cover alot of his techniques in making this beautiful image!
-Pete
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We had some figure drawing here at HU the other day, just to get better as artists. It was a great time, and I feel like it really helped me learn–even in such a short amount of time. Unfortunately I was out of newsprint so I was forced to draw in my small 8 1/2 x 11ish sketchbook. Oh well. Here are some things I drew.
Also, we started off doing 30 second drawings and moved up from there. I think a couple of the last ones were 15 or 20 minutes.
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So, how about Avatar?
I figured since it has now become the biggest grossing movie of all time (as reported by BoxOfficeMojo), it was about time that I wrote a little about my thoughts on the film Avatar. But first, a picture.
Let me first talk about how I approach movies. I know there are a lot of deep thinkers out there who watch movies for the sole purpose of being philosophically stimulated. They like to see reflections and perspectives on life, and the struggles and processes that people encounter and go through in their lives. Unless a movie has a deep and unique way of addressing these situations, the movie is no good. There are also those people who take movies a little less seriously, but still find it very important that they see something unique every time. Same sort of story twice? No way!
Well, I approach movies a little differently. I do like some deep thinking movies here and there. Forrest Gump was that way for me(ok, maybe that is a bit of a mainstream example…), as was the Royal Tenenbaums, to name a couple. They were really good, and really made me think. Watch movies like the Royal Tenenbaums all the time? Not my cup of tea. Honestly, while I really like them, to watch movies like that all the time would be incredibly stressful for me. You see, I usually watch movies to relax, not to think harder. Also, I don’t mind seeing the same-ish story more than once, but in different settings and with different characters. If it is a story I like, it works both times as far as I’m concerned. So I guess what it comes down to is that *most of the time* I watch movies to relax and have fun and enjoy a cool romp through a make-believe world(or at least a make-believe story in the real world). I like true stories, I like deep stories, but I don’t limit my enjoyment to that.
That being said, there *are* a couple ways that I judge movies. Firstly, if a movie’s content is conflicting with my morals, it is a no-go as far as entertainment goes, for me. There are plenty of movies that I can have fun watching that don’t have content I am not comfortable with. Secondly, what separates a good movie from a great movie, for me, is how much it affected me emotionally. Did I feel part of the story? Did I care about the characters and what happened to them? Did I feel joy, sadness, compassion, excitement? The more involved in the story I feel, the more I like it, as a general rule.
SO, back to Avatar. I think most people’s complaint about it is that the story is “incredibly unoriginal and bland.” Hmmm. Unoriginal? Yes, probably. Bland? I guess that depends on how many times you’ve seen the story before and whether or not you liked it in the first place. For me, however, I really don’t mind a simple story line here and there. I mean, Star Wars: A New Hope was incredibly simple. I loved it! I think there is a lot of beauty in simplicity that you cannot get with complexity (the opposite is also true). An extremely talented concept artist (Michael Spooner) from Disney once told me that suggestion is much more powerful than fact. I think that in simplicity there is more room for suggestion and imagination, and you can think a lot more about what is actually *there*. Now let me say I’m not saying either type of story is inherently better, I’m just saying that there is a lot of beauty in both.
So, unoriginal? Ok, ok, you have me there. Avatar was pretty unoriginal. I laughed a lot when I saw this. Pocahontas in space? They have a point… Aside from comedic value for me, though, it really didn’t ruin the movie for me in the least way.
Special Effects. You knew this was coming. I’m an animation major at Huntington University, so Digital Effects are of special interest to me anyways, but when I saw Avatar for the first time (in 3D), I was COMPLETELY blown away. I was stunned. I could not believe my eyes. Practically every shot was CG, and not only that, it was nearly flawless. It was like imagination made real before my eyes, and I was IN IT (because of the 3D). Seeing Avatar was like a milestone in my mind that made me think…ok, now we are truly to the point in films where anything we can dream up, we are able to make. When I first saw the world of Pandora at night, It was like THE sci-fi world that I had only been able to imagine was actually real before my eyes. And it was gorgeous. I think it is completely fair to say that Avatar was truly a Visual milestone in film. I would say it is the first of it’s kind, ever. Am I blowing the effects in it out of proportion? I don’t know, I suppose it is possible, but I truly was amazed by them.
One thing that was truly amazing to me, was this. They are dealing with an alien race that, though they resemble humans, we have never seen before. Yet even though this was the case, after only seeing a couple Avatars on the human base, I could instantly tell when I saw Neytiri that she was a beauty for her race. I could tell that she was special–more beautiful than all others in her race, more royal in a way. I hadn’t seen, yet, that she was the daughter of the chief–the princess of the tribe–yet I could already kind of tell. Isn’t that amazing? What an artistic accomplishment to convey such life to a character in a race that we have never seen before.
So, if you put together the story and the ground-breaking-effects, and like both of them (which I did) and in addition to all that you really like the characters, well, it’s entirely a win-win situation. Which is how I felt if you break it down, I suppose.
Was it perfect? Well, I guess it depends on what you are looking for. It was really really fun, I thought, and I felt really engaged in it. Which is what I was looking for. So as far as what I was looking for, it was really, really great.
Is it worthy to be the highest box office grosser of all time? Well. Let me answer that with a question. Would you rather Titanic have that spot back?
Pete out-
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The other day I was working in Maya, and I needed to copy the translation and rotation values of one object to the other. I thought to myself that it was a pain to have to remember the values of the one object and type them in the other object, or, if I was ambitious, to CTRL+C the values one at a time to the new object. So, I wrote this little script that does it for you. In it’s current form, you simply select the object you want to copy attributes FROM, followed by the object you want to copy attributes TOO (think “copy this to that”). After selecting the objects, run the script and wal-ah, it copies the attributes over.
For now, I have made it so that it only copies translation and rotation, because often those are the only ones you want copied. If you would like one that copies scale, or other attributes, I can show you how to do that.
To install the script, simply copy it into the script editor, then select it all and middle-mouse-click and drag it onto a toolbar.
// ——————————————–
// Pete Molinero
// piperpam27(at)yahoo(dot)com
// ———————————————
string $selected[] = `ls -sl` ;
float $parentX = getAttr ($selected[0] + “.rotateX”);
float $parentY = getAttr ($selected[0] + “.rotateY”);
float $parentZ = getAttr ($selected[0] + “.rotateZ”);
setAttr ($selected[1] + “.rotateX”) ($parentX);
setAttr ($selected[1] + “.rotateY”) ($parentY);
setAttr ($selected[1] + “.rotateZ”) ($parentZ);
float $parentX = getAttr ($selected[0] + “.translateX”);
float $parentY = getAttr ($selected[0] + “.translateY”);
float $parentZ = getAttr ($selected[0] + “.translateZ”);
setAttr ($selected[1] + “.translateX”) ($parentX);
setAttr ($selected[1] + “.translateY”) ($parentY);
setAttr ($selected[1] + “.translateZ”) ($parentZ);
Enjoy!
In Christ,
Pete Molinero
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