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.
Rigging
An old demo reel.
I did some digging around in my Vimeo page today and I’ve found some old gems!
Here is a Auto rigger demo from a T-Rex rig I built back in 2013.
Breaking Skinclusters?
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.
Rigging showreel 2012
Bottersnikes and Gumbles – Freelance Rigging
A freelance project I did some character rigging for is online! Hooray!
The project was for Mighty Nice in Sydney.
I worked with Pat Sarell to build body rigs for the Bottersnike and the Gumbles.
Cluster tool
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()