The Framework of Riggs

The following blog post is an explanation of how I structured the automated rigging system I wrote in python and PyMEL for Double Fine Productions called Riggs (after the main character Eddie Riggs from Brutal Legend), intended for individuals interested in rigging or character pipelines. Here's a demo of it:

Playstation 4 - Greatness Awaits

I worked on this Sony Playstation 4 commercial at The Mill. Rigged Killzone vehicles, Spiders, Diablo, Knack, Mechs, skeletons, and some other misc things. Animated Diablo, spiders, mechs, and a hoard of 150 skeletons climbing the base of the ferris wheel.

Polly Pocket

I worked on this commercial for Polly Pocket over at Nathan Love. She turns a rainy day into a water slide, FYI.

During this project I was responsible for all the previs, layout, rigging, animation, and character simulations.

Hair From Curve Script

Maya's hair system is a really powerful rigging tool, but the implementation makes it difficult to cleanly integrate into your rigs through script. It creates a bunch of extra nodes you don't need, names the resulting dynamic hair "curve1", and there is no way of specifying when you want to add a new follicle to an existing hairSystem node.

So I wrote a bare bones script in pymel that will create all the necessary nodes and connect them for you without creating all that extra junk.  If you pass in an existing hairSystem node name, it'll be added to that, otherwise a new hairSystem node will be created with the given name, or if you don't include a name it'll just make one up.

DOWNLOAD HERE

Fresh Skin

Turns out other folks have been using a script I shared with someone on tech-artists.org to help them with a particular rigging problem they had and I got an email about it because the tech-artists site is down so I figure I'll just put it up here.

The script is called Fresh Skin and it is pretty simple but very effective. It just duplicates the bound geometry, copies the skinning info over, deletes the original, and cleans up.  This fixes an insanely large number of issues but I wrote it a long time ago just to get rid of any unwanted history on a bound mesh.

1.Download below with right-click save as and save the file in you maya prefs folder in the scripts folder. For example c:/users/[yourusername]/documents/maya/scripts/
2. Restart Maya.
3. Select the bound mesh(es) you want to act on.
4. Run this command:  freshSkin;

DOWNLOAD HERE

Tools Reel 2012

A fast paced demo of my rigging and animation tools from the last 9 years.

The biggest of which is "Riggs", a modular automated rigging system written in Python/PyMel. At Double Fine the characters go through many stages of change so one of the focuses of this system was to facilitate that change and make it as fluid and simple as possible to make changes to full rigs.

It also had to be simple enough for animators with little rigging experience to use because the studio was too small for dedicated character riggers.