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!!
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.
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!!
^^
Morning all:
It has been quite a long time since i don’t post anything. That’s because during the last two months i have been going deeply into Rigging using Maya. In the way, i have also learnt Maya Python scripting and Pyside.
The previous image shows the first character i have developed in Maya. It’s name is Marian and has quite useful features as Stretchy Limbs, Non-Roll Twisting, Space Changes and a couple of interesting technics i have learnt here and there. Currently i am developing a Dynamic Space Change tool that for sure will be integrated into the Picker.
A demo video showing its main features will be soon available!!
^^
After a titanic fight againts dark forces, RapidSelection is finally published and available in the Asset Store ( hahahaha ). Simple yet usefull.
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’ 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.
^^
Hi all:
After a long time with no post, i show you all a new program i have been working on for the last 3 weeks. As the name of the post says, its an atlas generator for Presagis Creator, a 3D software focused in the 3D simulation field.
This article explains the way i have found to build a Circle using Bézier Curves. I have used 3DSMax and MaxScript to build it, but, of course, it’s the same within any software. Cubic Bézier Formula is next:
Well, s0, the P0 P1 P2 and P3 are the control points that define the Curve. The t is the position we would like to calculate. So, the start of the Curve is 0 and the End is 1. The definition says that P0 and P1 belongs to the path of the Curve. So, let’s build a 1 unit radius Circle.
And finally … here it is. My time in Seville is about to finish, and this video shows what i have been doing in my free time, apart from the flamenco and beers, of course. hope you enjoy
bb ^^
Last week, surfing to blenderartists.org forums, i have found some post speaking about influences of bones within Blender, and the way to limit them to a specific maximum number. This need is mainly due to the limits that some engines has: in this case, bone influences per vertex.
Some time ago i had the same problem exporting some characters to an external engine, and i wrote this little script to solve the problem.
The behavoir of the script is very simple. You can define the maximum number of weights modifying the global variable WEIGHT_MAX. You have to select the Mesh to be processed and execute the script. After the process, you are going to get the same number of influences in your vertex, but the influences with less weight would be set to 0,0. It doesn’t remove them. Then you’d have to apply the ‘Clean’ and ‘Normalize All’ inside Blender.
The last weeks, i have been skinning some characters inside Blender 3D. In order to do it correctly, i’ve created some ‘vertex group’, that i use along with the ‘mask’ modifier to hide some parts of the mesh. it makes the job easier.
After skinning, i exported characters to display in a game engine, and therein lies the problem. The normalizing of the influences is not correct. In Blender, ‘vertex group’ that we use with ‘armature’, they mix with all ‘vertex group’ we create to do something else, so, when we normalize the influence, Blender takes this ‘vertex group’ in account, and the calculation is incorrect. The consecuence of this is simply a bad deformation inside the external game engine.