Sean Nolan

Pre Maya 2008 with ext 2, the only way to select the mirrored component was to run a script. I’ve been doing some research and have looked at a slue of different ways of going about it. Some use pointOnMesh, polyConstraints, storing all the verts ID or a combination there of. 99.9% of these scripts make the assumption the model is symmetrical and if not then have the user give some sort of tolerance to calculate any slight changes between the two sides. Plus almost all the ones I’ve seen have to iterate over components in same way or fashion to determine world position and such. This can be slow and may not work on meshes that are symmetrical.

So lets break the problem down a bit: We want to have the flexibility of being in any component mode and be able to select the opposite side without inputing that we want left or right, the topology can be asymmetrical,we want this mirror selection to be as fast as possible and can not affect any construction history on the mesh.

Well, I may have come up with a possible solution that is quite outside the box and utilizes a tool set that would not be really considered as a means to select components. It’s relatively mesh resolution independent. Meaning the difference in time from 1k to 30k poly mesh is relatively small in comparison if you were to iterate over each component.

And the solution will be revealed right after these messages from our sponsors….oh wait….I don’t have any sponsors…..coffee break anyone?

face

back

front

Quick update on my modeling project.

So I started from scratch with my modeling project. I found some pretty good reference photos that really helped get my shapes and proportions. Thanks to all for links to artists, tutorials and suggestions. Been a great help. I think I’m at a much better starting point than I was before.

Surfing web pics never looked so good. www.piclens.com

A friend gave me a link to this, I installed it and was blown away.

*Edit: Removed pics.

Here is my first attempt at modeling in zbrush….so be nice =). I’m not trying to go after the crazy details but show some basic muscle shapes. There are some proportion issues I’m still trying to get a handle on but it’s getting there.

I’m just putting this out as a FYI. I’m going to delete my old blog(melandstuff) in the next few weeks. I have it up still but I have it redirecting to here. So if you got to this site but were looking for melandstuff, you’ll need to update your links. If you were looking for a specific topic, the search feature will get you there pretty quick.

Thanks to everyone that stops by.

Finally got on the Wordpress wagon. Man it was hard. What took so long was getting my posts and comments over from blogger into this site. Now I’m hosting my own wordpress so some features are different than the free hosting version. So I had to sign up for a temp wordpress site. Then got into all the settings and there is a great tool for importing blogger content into a wordpress site. However I had to update the blogger from an old format to a newer own. Then once that was done I exported the content from the temp wordpress into an xml file and imported it into the real wordpress. Jesus, what a journey that was.

Oh, then I had to somehow figure out how to redirect the blogger traffic over to the new spot. Placed some code I found into the template and have to play nice with google and disable any caching it may be doing on the old blog. Basically tell google to ignore the old blog.

For now, I’ve got it so anyone can post a comment in here. I have some anti-spam stuff installed so fingers are crossed. So no trying to sell me sex toys >:( ….rrrr.

Any of you a-hole spammers ruin it for everyone I’ll make it so you have to sign up and put some stupid image verification crap that you can never read. I’m still going to moderate comments though.

So it’s snolan.net and melandstuff combined in a pretty new package.

—>. VIDEO LINK. <—

• A 45 min comprehensive tutorial on how to setup an ik/fk arm
• How to avoid some pit falls with building an ik fk setup
• Building simple animation controls
• Simple blending without constraints and using the power of utility nodes
• How to build a seamless switching script that is BUILT IN THE RIG
• Script will work with referencing and make it so the arm will NEVER pop or float between modes

Why did I do this? Well, I see questions regrading this type of setup all over forums and I wanted to pay back the community for all the help I received when I was starting out. I hope this helps some new comers to rigging or just interested people.

Added***

I am including the final file (Should work with Maya 7.0, let me know if it does not) and the code used for making the ik fk switch.

Maya File

Mel Code for Switch

Note: You must have zooToolBox installed and the scripts installed in the correct directory. This process is explained in the video.

More Maya Python fun

This is in addition to what I said below but I found a little better interactive shell that ships with wxPython called PyCrust.
Go to http://wxpython.org/download.php and download the win32-ansi for Python 2.5 and the “docs and demos” too. This will get you the PyCrust. Just let everything install in default locations and say yes to compile the packages.

No goto your Programs->wxPython2.8 docs and demos->PyCrust.
You should get this.

Now lets interact with Maya.

Type:
import maya.standalone
maya.standalone.initialize(name=’python’)

As soon as you do you start to see this:

You get some nice info from Maya and using this in an external editor.

Now type:
import maya.cmds as cmds
cmds.polySphere()

You should now have auto-complete showing you the command. Pretty cool, eh?

Yea, I wish it would show the flags associated with the command.
Now this not really a full editor. It’s just an interactive shell but you could quickly proto-type something in PyCrust and port it over to your editor that is your main script. If you goto the history tab you can quickly copy/paste your chunk of code back over to your editor. This is just a great way to test something out without having to launch Maya up.

Maya and Python development

Not sure if many people are aware of this but it is possible to develop python scripts in Maya without having Maya open and interact with Maya. Wait…what? Yea, you can interact with Maya without having the Maya interface open. Think of it as Maya in command-line mode. But to get this to work you have to add a few things to your system environment variables. Most of this is straight from the Maya help docs but doesn’t mention about IDLE.

Rt click on My Computer and goto properties. Goto the Advanced tab and click on Environmental Variables.
Create a new System Variable.
Variable name: MAYA_LOCATION
Variable value: DRIVE:\Program Files\Autodesk\2008\
Create one more Systerm Variable.
Variable name: PYTHONPATH
Variable value: DRIVE:\Program Files\Autodesk\2008\Python\lib\site-packages

So probably the best place to test this is using IDLE that comes with Python 2.5.
So if you type the 2 lines below and save the file then run it (F5) it will startup maya in the background. Give it a sec to initialize.

Once you’ve run that you’ll have an interactive session that you can use to script with and have auto-complete help with hard to remember commands.

Remember, Maya will be running in the background as long as you have the python interpreter up and don’t run the maya.standalone twice.

Now open up a new window and import a Maya module and you’ll now have auto-complete working with Maya.

*Note*: Now remember that this is just a command-line interaction and no UI so you can’t run a script that opens up a mel cmds UI(ie. showWindow). You could however open a Tkinter window outside of Maya and have this UI interact with Maya that is running in the background. Totally doable.

Hope this is helpful and makes python development in Maya at bit more fun for ya.