Category: programming

autoRotate

gmendieta Leave a comment

Hi all:

Last weekend while navigating through a couple of prop rigs i did some time ago, i realized that wherever i need to make an object auto-rotate properly, i use expressions all the time in order do the math stuff. For instance, storing previous world space positions and previous rotations. So finally i decided to spend my saturday morning developing a custom node to do the job.

Here is the result:

autoRotate is a C++ custom Autodesk Maya MPxNode that calculates the rotation in degrees based on world space delta movement, radius, global scale and movement axis.
Although simple i found out that it is really useful in several situations as the ones shown in the examples. Moreover, it simplifies the setup and avoid the use of expressions.

Hope you like it!!

collisionDeformer

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collisionDeformer is a Maya custom deformer that allows you to deform a geometry based on collisions with other geometries. The collision computation is done in several steps:

Firstly the vertex that are supposed to collide are repositioned. Secondly, based on maximum reposition distances and several input parameters vertices around collision are also repositioned trying to maintain the total volume of the mesh.

Although under development yet, results and degree of control are quite good.

Hope you like it!

customLocator

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During this weekend i had some time to finish the customLocator node in Autodesk Maya. This node allows the user to draw some predefined shapes in OpenGL: Circle, Cube, Disc, Locator, Arrow and Cone.

The node contains some useful parameters that change the way OpenGL will draw the shapes. For instance, Colors, XRay, Fade based on Distance.

See you soon ^^

meshControl Custom Locator

gmendieta 1 Comment

Ladies and Gentlemens, i introduce you meshControl: a custom Locator for Autodesk Maya, developed in C++, that draws a list of faces of a geometry in the viewport 3D using OpenGL. The node has some useful parameters to modify the way OpenGL will paint the geometry, such as selected Color, unselected Color, XRay, Fade based on Distance. Moreover, a custom Tool has been developed to make easier the process of creation, modification and search of the Locators.

♥  Hope you like it!!

Maya Rigging Tools Reel 2016

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As most of you already know, during the last months I have been studying Rigging and Tools developing in Maya full-time. This is the result. There are several Rigs and Tools that haven’t been included in this Demo. Nevertheless, I will try to post about them as soon as possible. Enjoy ^^.

Click as much as you want!! It does nothing!!

3D Studio Max Skinning Tool inside Maya

gmendieta 2 Comments

When i started rigging in Maya, i found the way of weighting, using mainly painting tools, a little weird in some cases. It was quite annoying to weight some vertices in fast and accurate way. So i decided to develop a tool that emulates the weigting tool that is available in 3D Studio Max.

Using this tool, it is quite easy to set, scale, add or substract a small amount of influences from a pool of vertices with just a couple of mouse clicks. I found it astonishingly fast weighting fingers, lips, eyelids, and generally, places where i want the weight to be decreasing following loops or rings.

mnWeightTool

It has been developed using Python and PySide with custom Widgets ( for every row in the list of joint influences ). I have also added the possibility of Live Update the scene while user modifies influences using sliders shown in the picture, thought this option might become slow depending on the number of vertices being modified.

Anyone interested in using it, just give me a little whistle!!

^^

 

RapidSelection

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RapidSelection

After a titanic fight againts dark forces, RapidSelection is finally published and available in the Asset Store ( hahahaha ). Simple yet usefull.

Link to Asset Store

 

 

RapidSelection is a Unity Editor extension that allow users to manage selections in an intuitive way. By using the same editor styles built-in windows use, and tracking keyboard and mouse events, make Rapid Selection‘s workflow easy and straight.

At the end, the development process has been quite long. The first and second prototype was working exactly as this one, but i realized that the workflow was not intuitive. The user had to make a couple of mouse clicks just to have a selection saved. Moreover, the UI was not look like Unity UI. So finally i decided to go a little deeper and understand how IMGUI works, and try to imitate Unity UI.

I am very grateful to David Sevilla for the amazing work he did with the design of all the necessary images for the Store.

^^

Codility

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‘Codility’ is a service that offers an awesome way for companies to hire new programmers. On the other hand, it offers an awesome way for developers to demonstrate their programming skills to companies. Basically, a developer has 2 hours to develope a program that resolve a well defined test. At the moment it could be resolved in C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Lua, Objective-C, PHP, Pascal, Perl, Python, Ruby, Scala or VB.NET, focusing in the way a developer thinks, and not in a specific syntax or specific language.

For programmers, ‘Codility’ has several available lessons, where they try to make us think about specific topics ( i.e. “Time Complexity”, “Sorting”, “Fibonacci numbers” ) each of them with a little pdf file with some reading material. I encourage you to test ‘Codility’. The worst thing that it could happen is that you would waste 2 hours.

^^