Rigging

My latest demo reel

Posted by Alastair

My most recent demo reel is of my work at PlaySide Studios where I have been rigging characters and looking after artist tools and pipeline.
In this demo reel I am showing the final rendered mesh of the asset, the skeleton of the asset, to demonstrate the capabilities of the rig and its efficiencies. Then showing a wireframe overlay to display the deformation of the character clearly.

Breaking Skinclusters?

Posted by Alastair

Skin Clusters break sometimes. Or you just want to copy skinning from one character to another.

Usually when I have a skin cluster playing up I rebind a duplicate of the mesh to the joints and copy the skin weights from the original mesh.
To do this:
1. Duplicate mesh
2. bind duplicated mesh to the same joints as the original
3. copy skin weights over from old mesh with Skin > Edit Smooth Skin > Copy Skin Weights

Gives you a fresh skin cluster but with the skinning you’d setup already.

Cluster tool

Posted by Alastair

I wrote a bit of code that will create a cluster on polygon geometry regardless of selection type, eg face, edge or vertex. Speeds things up a little.

import maya.cmds as cmds
def makeCluster():
	selection = cmds.ls(sl=True)
	for i in selection:
		string = str(i)
		try:
			object,selected = string.split('.')
			sel,CVnum = selected.split('[')
			if sel == 'e':
				verts = cmds.polyListComponentConversion(selection,fromEdge=True,toVertex=True)
				cmds.select(verts, r=True)
			print 'passed edge'
			if sel == 'f':
				verts = cmds.polyListComponentConversion(selection,fromFace=True,toVertex=True)
				cmds.select(verts, r=True)
			print 'passed face'
			if sel == 'vtx':
				print ' no conversion needed'
			print 'passed vtx'
		except:
			print 'object selected'

	cmds.cluster()
makeCluster()