A Stretchy IK

I have been helping a co-worker learn some rigging techniques, and since I'm essentially making tutorials, I figured I might as well post them for others to benefit from as well!  Today's topic is how to make an IK limb stretchy.

The basic idea is that we will measure the original length of the IK from start joint to handle, and any time that distance increases beyond its original value, the bones of the IK limb will scale to make up the extra distance rather than rotating beyond what makes sense (the cause of popping).


Let's dive right in!

GW2 @ PAX Prime 2011

The charr have fingers!! No more mitten-paws holding guns! Now every time they take a leap forward you get to see a gorgeous set of claws unfurl before them. That alone would have made this animator's heart happy, but there was so much more to be had.

Little Maya Cheaters

I've been known at my various places of employment for always looking for ways to cheat. Call it laziness if you like, but I've always believed in working smarter rather than harder. As a result, I'm frequently whipping up little scripts to speed up the workflow of my projects or to save my keyboard from repetitive use damage.

In maya there are a dozen or so core little scripts that I come back to over and over and over again. They just keep finding new ways to be useful. I've shared one or two with my co-workers and friends as the need arose, but I'd never really sat down and organized the lot of them for popular consumption.

Well, that's all changed now. They're free to download and use as you like, but please don't redistribute them.

Here's the overview of what's included:

Joints and orients and iks, oh my!

A lead rigging position in a decentralized studio means lots of emails about the proper way to do things. Here's one more I shall share with you! Kernels of wisdom about joint orientations (and how you shouldn't forget them) as well as a couple of comments on quadruped rigging.

Sylvari Week Begins!

When it comes to fashioning a fantasy character for oneself, I've always gravitated towards shape shifters and nature-born creatures. I especially have a fascination with and love for shapeshifters who would fashion their clothing, weapons, and really any required tool, from their own forms. It's not just the idea of it that intrigues me, its the visual application. How does the transition look, how does something flow from one form to another, and where does it stop?

I used to doodle shapeshifters half-way between two forms, shifted just enough to facilitate whatever new need had taken them. The efficiency of life tends to work that way, after all. Life is rather lazy when it comes right down to it, and in that laziness you can find an elegant efficiency.

Unfortunately, technical limitations usually keep that sort of cool fluidity out of our games.

Horse Color Genetics Simulator

Anyone who knows me knows that as a kid, like so many other little girls out there, I had a horse phase. Less like so many other little girls, I was also a nerd. For a good 6-10 years of my childhood I was a veritable walking encyclopedia of horses. Any time you establish a knowledge base like that it's bound to resurface time and time again. So while I wouldn't really be considered a horse nut anymore, I do have periods of indulgence where I tap back into that childhood passion and make use of the sponge that was my grade-school brain.

One such indulgence was a horse genetics simulator I made in 2007. I made it, friends laughed about Jeno and her horses again, and it slid off the radar and into the archive of "things I did" floating around the internet.

Occasionally I would get emails from a college student in equine veterinary studies thanking me for helping them get a handle on the difficult subject of coat color genetics. Other than that I didn't think much about the little page I had created.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

I just finished reading this trilogy, and I'm a bit sad that I can't convince more of my friends to try it out. It's a good mystery set in modern times, and the female lead is a very interesting character. I'd like to avoid spoiling anything, as I'm still determined to get other people to read it too.

I did attempt to watch the Swedish movies, but they weren't very good overall. The first one was alright, but the second one fell right off the tracks. The pacing was terrible and I completely disagree with which sub-plots got left in and which got removed. The interesting tidbits that got you through the boring set-up areas in the book were absent on the screen, leaving a rambling and dry second movie.

There's also an American version coming which is being directed by David Fincher. I tend to like his movies and think he's a good fit for this trilogy, so I'll definitely be watching that when it comes out.

The Week of Yummy Asian Food in the International District

It's not very often weeks can be given titles, but if you were to assign a title to this last week of mine, that's what it would be.

Last Saturday some friends and I had the great pleasure of wandering the streets of the international district for the Dragon Festival. No, not the GW event that happened the weekend before, but an actual real life Dragon Festival.

Many of the local restaurants put $2 taster options on their menu for the weekend, and if you tried out any 4 of them you'd get entered into a drawing for something or other. With a group of people it turned into quite the adventure. Everyone got a small taste of the $2 sample, and we got to try a ton of different stuff.

It was like a scavenger hunt, but for food. It was glorious.

My favorite ended up being the shrimp dim sum from the Dim Sum King and the pu-erh tea from the New Century Tea Gallery. They had a ton of pu-erh varieties, so I'd actually have to look up which was the one we liked so much. Many of them were aged. I'd never heard of aging tea before, but apparently wine and cheese aren't the only things that get better with time.

The Oasis tea shop, while not really having tea to write home about, had a really nice vibe going on and provided its not always that loud and busy I'd love to just hang out there sometime. You don't often find a tea place with a pool table. Overall I really liked the feeling of the International district. It had a lot of character. I don't know if I'd be brave enough to live there right now, but its certainly tempting to keep in mind.

Later in the week I was back in the area for a tour at my friend's company (which was awesome), and we stopped for lunch first at the Canton Noodle House. I really enjoyed their wonton soup. It was quite reasonably priced too, so if I find myself in the area and in need of lunch again, I'll definitely be stopping back in.

Eclipse as a Maya IDE

I've been a hobbyist programmer for over a decade (damn, has it really been that long already?) and by necessity a semi-professional scripter for a little over 3 years. For the vast majority of that I was perfectly content to use an advanced text editor. As long as I had my color coding and and the occasional bracket mis-match highlighting, I was set. I even went so far as to program the entirety of my genetics sim game in SciTE.

Only a few months ago did I decide to finally see what all the fuss was about with IDEs. It took a day of tutorial diving in order to get Eclipse complete functional and communicating with Maya, but boy was it work it!

I set out this morning to put together a small stack of my tiny tools that my friends could download and benefit from, but instead of fixing one minor world-parent bug like I was supposed to, I felt the urge to praise Eclipse somewhere. And hey, it's Saturday. I might as well celebrate. ;)

Robo Ball

This is a little animation using my RoboBall rig! The rig is free to download and use. If you know maya, I hope you'll download it and give it a spin! Okay. Bad pun, but I had a lot of fun making this little guy and I'm really excited to share it.

If you make any videos using this rig, please post them as video responses on youtube. I'd love to see what you do with it!

The rig should be pretty self explanatory, but creators always seem to think that. ;) If you can't read my mind when you open the file, here's a demonstration of the rig's basic functions.

There's some technical insights if you stick around after the jump!

Clean rotate values from your FK controls

Here's some basic rigging info that my coworkers needed.  As long as I put the effort into collecting it, I might as well share it with others too!

A lot of higher level rigging problems, particularly in the set-driven fixes area, can be avoided if your basics are solid.  While its amazingly easy to make a basic rig that moves things and appears to work, making one that will have clean values computed quickly, and thus make higher-level rigging easier, requires attention to some details that can be easily overlooked.

Yay quickie sketch!