Thursday, November 20, 2008
Tip of the Week:
Automatic Shelf Icons
Maya's shelves are handy, but sometimes it's nice to be able to customize them for your own specific workflow - organizing your favorite tools and commands in one easy to access location.
You may already be familiar with using the middle mouse button to save your own custom shelf buttons. (Enter some MEL into the script editor, highlight it, and drag it to the shelf). This is great for scripts that you write or find online.
But for commands and tools that are native to Maya, there's a great shortcut. Hold down Ctrl + Alt + Shift and select an item from any of the drop down menus on the menu bar (e.g. Create > Measure Tools > Arc Length Tool). The best part is: not only does it automatically generate the button, but it automatically assigns an appropriate image icon.
Labels: GUI, Hotkeys, Maya, Tip of the Week
+ posted by Paul @ 8:37 PM 0 Comments | Links to this post
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Thursday, October 30, 2008
Rig Preview
Here's an early look at the control rig for the pumpkin character in my short.
Not quite done yet, but far enough along to start blocking. The hierarchy and basic range of motion are all in place. From here on out, there are just details to add.
It's set up for full facial animation (via the sliders on the left) and squash and stretch (via the control curves). It's built mainly on blendshapes, plus a few bones for fine-tuning silhouettes. For simplicity's sake, I tried to keep the amount of on-rig GUI to a minimum, opting instead to drive many of the controls with custom attributes in the channel editor. This was a combination of personal preference and what seamed appropriate for this specific rig.
Labels: GUI, Maya, Project News, Rigging
+ posted by Paul @ 11:10 PM 0 Comments | Links to this post
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Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Tip of the Week:
Character GUI Generator
Here's a great script by Karim Kashefy, posted recently on Highend3D. It's a custom window for creating nurbs GUI for character rigs. It comes with a bunch of shape presets, as well as functions for setting the color, hiding/locking attributes, and freezing transformations.
Character Controllers
Labels: GUI, Maya, plug-ins, Rigging, Tip of the Week