Riggerman’s Blog

Hey people!

As some of you may know, and realized by seeing some of my old posts, I really dig into games : ) I'm studying Unity3D engine on my free time to someday create a game of my own and who knows, maybe sell it? : )

Anyhow, today I'd like to say a little about a game a good friend and co-worker of mine, Cleverson Leal, created for iPhone, iPods and such. He created it in his spare time and not surprisingly, it rocks! ;-D

His game is called Rescue City and everything was done by himself and just that is already a great accomplishment! The game is free for you to try, you get to play dozens of levels and if you like it, you can buy the full game for $0,99.
The main objective is to help the citizens of different cities. You help by attending calls of three types of emergencies: hospital calls with the ambulance, fire calls with the fire truck and police calls with the police car.

Whenever a call is happening, you have a certain time to send a unit to the rescue, you do this by sliding your finger on the roads tracing the path you want the unit to go. The catch is: there will be times when simultaneous calls are happening and you must attend them all but the cars can collide with each other, so you gotta think fast and plan different routes for the different units while paying attention to the calls deadlines! : )

As the game progresses, the difficulty increases with harder city layouts, constant calls and unique features are added like for instance, an express road where every car's speed is boosted that can be used to your advantage. There are other stuff coming on future updates but for that I'll leave his game's official website link for you to check out.

Support people like Cleverson so they can continue making great games! Try it out on iTunes for free, and if you like it, buy it in-game for $0.99!

3DWorld and 3DTotal teamed-up to bring us this awesome printed only publication - Maya Essentials.

Why is it so awesome? Because the Rigging in Maya Tutorial Series that I wrote with Danilo is part of the publication!! : ) It's our first work that was printed and we're really happy to be able to hold it in our hands, it's definitely rewarding in a different kind of way. :- D

The tutorials covers some key concepts for rigging characters and was written for beginner to intermediate students.
Many thanks to Danilo for joining me in this endeavour, and many thanks to Jim Thacker from 3DWorld for the awesome text review and support!

Go get yours now!! They ship world-wide!
http://www.myfavouritemagazines.co.uk/design-bookazines-maya-essentials/

Here are some pictures of the book so you can sneak peek:

Using this wiki as inspiration and studying Cython, I created a python module that you can import but can't edit or see any code. >: D

Usage:

1) Select a vertex (only one) in a mesh that has its UVs laid out;

2) Turn on soft selection ("B" hotkey)

3) Run this block of code:
from softCluster import *
createSoftCluster()

4) Play : )

You can download the module here: MediaFire Link

The can't have overlapping UVs so the script can create follicles correctly on the mesh. I did some quick tests and it should work on most cases - namely it will not work on meshes that are driven solely by blendshapes, as the deformation won't occur correctly.

*Please note it will work on skinCluster driven meshes that have blendshapes for fixes and things such as face shapes or bulge fixes. It doesn't deform correctly on exclusively blendshape driven meshes.*

The script creates a cluster (yes, it is a simple cluster deformer) using the soft selection's information. You can also paint to tweak its deformation weighting.

Now you can show them how you feel about 'em!!

Bugs, suggestions or whatever, feel free to comment or mail me.

Today a weird thing happened in our pipeline concerning an expression and global variables.

We're doing a car movie and we used a script that rotates the wheels automatically based on the car's positions, it stores an 'old position', gets the current frame position and does the math to rotate the wheels. I don't know why, but the expression was designed to store these vectors in global variables... by simply creating attributes in the car's reference to store this data, we could point each expression to its own attributes and conflicts wouldn't happen, but I didn't write the script and it's not the case.

I was called because the wheels weren't moving in a scene with more than 1 car.
I thought that it would take too much time to retarget the global variables to local attributes so I started doing some tests to see when the expression broke.
First I referenced two cars together. Even with the global variables being set in the wheels expression, both cars were working perfectly! Weird isn't, it? It's like there was some kind of 'namespace' in variables. Then I thought it could be a Maya save/load thing that broke it all and did that. Saved and loaded a test scene. Nothing happened, the car rig was still working.

Imported the references and the wheels still worked. Asking some people, I discovered that in order to gain more flexibility and avoid multiple reference levels, the render team imported the cars directly into the scene and that led to the errors and the wheels not moving. Whilst if we referenced the car before importing, the expressions did not get messed up.

Comparing the expressions from directly-imported and referenced-imported cars, they're identical, except from the obvious namespaces that Maya creates in the expression names:
CAR1_expression1_l_front_tire (direct imported name)
CAR1:expression1_l_front_tire (referenced imported name)

I'm guessing it does create some kind of namespace into variables, even though I can't access them thru mel:
print $l_front_wheel_old_pos
...prints me the last wheel evaluated. And there is NO way I can access something like CAR1:$l_front_wheel_old_pos.

Later on this week, I'll be notified if the reference-before-import works to keep the expressions up and running. Or not. >_>

Any ideas on this matter?

SpongeBob's in da house, making everyone at Vetor Zero, Lobo and Animatorio happier! :- )

If you're using Maya 2009, change the Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2009\icons\AutoCam\VCfacemap.png file.
If you're using Maya 2011, change the Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2011\resources\AutoCam\Textures\VCfacemap.png file.

To make SpongeBob your Maya partner, download these two files and replace them into the folders listed above:
VCfacemap.png
VCfacetext.png

Tip from Autodesk Graham Bell's blog!

I'm searching for a way to change the viewCube's model.