2008 Reel
By Richard | June 19, 2009
Whoops, I forgot to post this little guy at the end of the last year!
It’s been ready for some time already. Expect a new reel with newer stuff soon.
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Download my Character TD Reel for the year of 2008 here:
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| Richard Maegaki's 2008 Rigging Reel |
It’s about 28mb in size and features some professional and personal projects.
I hope you enjoy watching it as much I enjoyed making it!
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BG music from Soukaigi!
Topics: Animation, Rigging | 1 Comment »
StickyIt - Automatic Sticky Lips solution script
By Richard | June 4, 2009
Hey everyone! Long time no see!
Sorry about that, I’ve been really busy lately with personal stuff. To be more specific, about two months ago I started dating a really, really nice girl! And I must say, that does change the perspective of everything! It’s a very renewing and profound experience to get to know someone so close - I recommend it to everyone; yes, it’s my first girlfriend. And I’m loving it! I mean, her!
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Anyhow, let’s get back to business.
I’ve been studying the Sticky Lips effect for about 2 weeks now, after seeing Matt Schiller’s Reel. I’ve seen this a while back but didn’t get motivated enough to try to replicate it. Until now. Because I’ve been studying Topological Navigation of meshes, to achieve mirroring and other crazy stuff without needing the mesh to be world-space symmetrical - that means the script navigates through the actual vertices and edges, it doesn’t check if a point exists in +X and in -X with a margin nor needs the mesh to be on the origin of the scene.
You can check a really nice tutorial on the sticky lips rig by Volker Helzle here.
Motivated with the current studies AND a competition from TD College to get a full free course by showing my most advanced technical piece of work, I made this script in about 4 days. And here’s the result:
StickyIt script demo - Automatic Sticky Lips solution for Maya from Riggerman on Vimeo.
Thanks to Luiz Elias for providing these awesome models for the recording!
The script is still not complete! I’m adding an automatic sticky attribute so you don’t need to animate it everytime. There’s also some weight fixing to do when you add more and more dropoffs. Enjoy!
Topics: Rigging, Maya Python | 2 Comments »
Paint Skin Weights Tool Filter
By Richard | March 1, 2009
Hey all, did you know it’s very easy to change Maya’s user interface?
It’s everything written in MEL (there’s a ton of scripts) and you can find them in a folder that is located somewhere like this: MAYADIR\scripts\others
As a character rigger, I usually do the paint bind skin process a LOT. And since I’m not a math genius to write an automatic-surface-recognition-skin-cluster, I only did a little change to the original Paint Skin Weights Tool and added an influence filter.
That’s right, no new pop-up menus to mess up my workspace. I just added a text field to filter out my influences.
Here’s the full influence list:
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And here’s the filtered influence list:
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You can also have multiple filters at the same time, very handy.
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If you wanna try customizing yours too, it it’s very simple. Try taking a look into artAttrSkinProperties.mel and artAttrSkinCallback.mel files.
For the filtering algorithm, python can be really useful:
filter = ’sometext’
listToBeFiltered = [’notext’, ’sometext_here’, ‘alotoftext’]for eachWord in listToBeFiltered:
if filter in eachWord: print ‘We have a winner!’, eachWord, ‘contains’, filter
I think I’ll be adding some features for locking weights and such. Have fun!
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Topics: Rigging | 2 Comments »
Maya Custom Manipulator/Locator
By Richard | November 15, 2008
It’s really simple and quick to make your own nodes and plugins using python in Maya!
Here’s my own locator and manipulator, I just modified the existing footPrintManip scripted plugin that comes in the Maya Devkit. Another advantage of a scripted plugin is that you don’t need to recompile it when using in different Maya versions.
The manipulator sets an attribute that you can connect with anything you need, you can also use the channelbox to modify it. When the user stretches too much, it’s locator gets painted to say: “hey, you’re going too far!”
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Topics: Rigging, Maya Python | 1 Comment »
2008 Teaser!
By Richard | October 16, 2008
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Hey all! Long time no see!
I’ve been really busy lately - mainly doing nCloth and Maya Hair simulation for work… the blog was a little bit abandoned so I decided to compile some works I did these last months with some cool music from Tekken - my favorite fighting game.
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Did I ever say that I want to work with games?? Well, I’ll try to direct my studies to this goal from now on.
Topics: Rigging | 2 Comments »
