2007 archive

December 10th, 2007

Santa on a Very Small Hill

Where he's stepping to I don't know.


November 9th, 2007

Hats

What fun we had in our hat club.


October 20th, 2007

Dash

For as many times as I've listened to this line, I'm still not sure whether it's a man or a woman.

I went with woman.


July 9th, 2007

The site works again

Comments and entries were broken for a little while due to a PHP upgrade and some sloppiness on my part.  Everything should be back to normal now.


June 6th, 2007

abAutoRig 3.1

A simple to use skeleton builder and autorigger that builds a fast, animator friendly, bipedal rig.  Some of the features include:

  • Entirely node based.
  • Fully scaleable.
  • Stretchy IK/FK legs and arms.
  • Combo IK/FK spine with up to 18 joints (and true IK as of version 1.9).
  • Knee and elbow snap to pole vector control.
  • Standard foot controls including footRoll, footBreak, toeRoll, toeTwist, ballTwist.
  • Space switching on all major control curves (including a tool to copy control positions across space switches).
  • Support for upleg, upArm, and foreArm split joints (up to two each).
  • FK/IK head controls.
  • FK/IK fingers.
  • FK/IK and IK/FK matching on the legs and arms.
  • Auto align on relevant FK controls.
  • A tool to create a skeleton for your character.
  • A tool for quick and easy control curve mirroring and modification (includes lots of prebuilt control curves).
  • A tool for easy rig removal and update.
  • A tool for easy creation of a scaleable, stretchy IK spline joint chain (complete with FK controllers) from a curve.
  • The ability to change the rotation order of control curves across an animation and retain your poses.

I wrote this script with the intention of using it to rig my own characters for my Animation Mentor short.  Unfortunately, it took long enough to write that I didn't have time to build and use it with my own characters.  

What I'm trying to say is that it hasn't been properly put it through its paces.  It might break horribly, it might not.  Ok, it probably won't break horribly, but I can't imagine there isn't something that I've overlooked.  Please let me know if you do find any bugs or have any problems at all with it.  If it works great for you, I'd love to hear about that too.

And as always, suggestions are appreciated. ... read more »


February 20th, 2007

abMakeQuickSelectBn 1.3

A super simple script that creates a shelf button which, when pressed, will reselect all of the currently selected transforms.  If any attributes are selected in the channelBox only those selected attributes will be recalled.

Holding the shift or control key when pressing a quick select shelf button will add to or remove from the existing selection.

Note that the script needs to be sourced for the quick select buttons to work.... read more »


February 12th, 2007

Along Came a Spider

A recent rerender of an animation I did a few months ago.


January 9th, 2007

abBookmarkCurves 2.0

New with Maya 8 is the ability to bookmark curves in the Graph Editor.  This script extends that functionality and packs into a nice little UI while adding, among other things, the ability to filter displayed curves by attribute.  

As a bonus, it also works with Maya 7 (and maybe Maya 6 as well).... read more »


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