redesigndavid.me » Scripting

Demo Reel 2010

redesigndavid — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 13:19:38 +0000

Animate Blendshapes Weights per Vertex

redesigndavid — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 07:57:21 +0000

I found a way to animate blendshapes’ weights, without any plugin, merely using connections. I’m posting a tutorial soon. You think you can figure out a way to accomplish this? I will post a tutorial in two weeks time. The technique would be applicable to more than just weights for blendshapes. It might even be possible to control weights for skinCluster joints too (if that helps for anything? Yeah, it should.) Some other possible applications would be blendshapes for the way Eddie Murphy turned into Nutty Professor. Thanks everyone!!!! :) Hope to hear from you!

Add Joints Per Vertex

redesigndavid — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 09:27:25 +0000

There are two methods to make an a mesh follow the vertexes of another mesh. One is to use a wrap deformer or add the influencing mesh as an influence in a skinCluster with use components enabled. The problem with wraps is it could get a bit slow. The problem with the next is somehow the post normalization available in Maya2011 doesn’t work with it. I decided to write a script that create joints and make the follow each vertex on the influencing mesh. Theoretically, you’ll have the best of all words. proc jointsOnVerts (string $polygon) { $grp = `createNode transform -n ($polygon+"vtxGRP")`; $size = size(`polyInfo -faceToVertex $polygon`); for ($i=0;$i<int($size);$i++){ $trans = `createNode transform`; $pos = `xform -q -ws -t ($polygon+".vtx["+$i+"]")`; xform -ws -t $pos[0] $pos[1] $pos[2] $trans; $fol=`createFolliclePolygon $trans $polygon`; delete $trans; $joint = `createNode joint -n ($polygon+"vtx"+$i)`; parent $joint $fol[0]; setAttr ($joint+".t") 0 0 0; setAttr ($joint+".r") 0 0 0; setAttr ($joint+".jo") 0 0 0; parent $fol[0] $grp; } } proc string[] createFolliclePolygon (string $posTransform, string $nurbsSurface) { // make vector product nodes to get correct positions of the transform node $vecprod = `createNode vectorProduct`; setAttr ($vecprod+".operation") 4; connectAttr ($posTransform+".worldMatrix") ($vecprod+".matrix"); connectAttr ($posTransform+".rotatePivot") ($vecprod+".input1"); // connect the correct position to a closest point on surface node created $cpos = `createNode closestPointOnMesh -n ($posTransform+"_CPOS")`; connectAttr ($nurbsSurface+".worldMesh") ($cpos+".im"); connectAttr ($vecprod+".output") ($cpos+".inPosition"); // create a follicle node and connect it $folTransform = `createNode transform -n ($posTransform+"follicle")`; $fol = `createNode follicle -n ($posTransform+"follicleShape") -p $folTransform`; connectAttr -f ($fol+".outTranslate") ($folTransform+".translate"); connectAttr -f ($fol+".outRotate") ($folTransform+".rotate"); connectAttr -f ($nurbsSurface+".outMesh") ($fol+".inputMesh"); connectAttr -f ($nurbsSurface+".worldMatrix[0]") ($fol+".inputWorldMatrix"); setAttr ($fol+".parameterU") (`getAttr ($cpos+".parameterU")`); setAttr ($fol+".parameterV") (`getAttr ($cpos+".parameterV")`); //create a blend between two attributes, a constant and the parameterU output of the cpos to control the follicle's parameter U $blendU = `createNode blendTwoAttr`; setAttr ($blendU+".input[0]") (`getAttr ($cpos+".parameterU")`); connectAttr ($cpos+".parameterU") ($blendU+".input[1]") ;…

Blending Spline IKs and Ribbon Setups

redesigndavid — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 07:37:37 +0000

I was unhappy with the controls I was giving the tentacles of our squid/octopus-looking monster. I decided to recreate them. This time, I’ll avoid as many constraints as I possibly could. And I’ll notate as I go through everything. Right from the start, we wanted to give each tentacle an ability to pose in all sorts of ways. The control types that came to mind were either a spline IK or a ribbon controller. There are pros and cons for both. The ik spline is awesome. It is widely used for lots of setups. I’ve seen cat tails and pony tails set up in this manner. Essentially, ik splines (like most ik systems) handle the rotations of your joints. It handles them so that they would always fall exactly where your curve is. My problem with using this for our tentacles is its lack of ability to twist in a detailed manner. If you wonder why CG systems haven’t developed enough to meet this requirement, you are asking the wrong question. The lack of proper twisting for spline IK’s makes sense. Splines, after all, cannot twist–just as a point contains no information of orientation and a line has no idea of where its flat surface may be. This lack is solved by a ribbon setup. A ribbon, after all, is what you get when you extrude a spline in a direction giving it an ability to twist. A ribbon setup is also awesome. There’s a gazillion things you could do with a ribbon setup and it all depends on how much you control you want to have. In essence, you’ll have a bunch of joints or transforms follow specific points on a surface in position and orientation. If you twist that surface, those joints would all twist for you. And…

Download Beta Version JD-redesignImages

redesigndavid — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 04:06:41 +0000

The images has, of course, nothing to do with the download. The download contains the latest version of my first plugin, JD-redesignImages. Learn more about it from this post.

JD redesignImages

redesigndavid — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 10:52:58 +0000

WordPress has never been so amazing! With JD redesignImages, you can avoid hotlinked images on your site. Cuz if we all play our part, we can make the world a better place. Let’s say, you have a blog. You won’t spend all your time reading your own blog’s articles. That’ll bore you to death! You probably know all of them by heart anyway, unless you stole those too! Instead, you’d probably be reading somebody else’s blog. And often, you’d like to write something about somebody’s artwork and in the process beautify your own drab blog with a sample image (or gallery depending on how low your morals are). Then, you have two choices. One, you either download the image–or gallery, we talked about this already–unto your HD and re-upload them unto your blog. This takes time. After which, you lay them on your post, write your thoughts (pretend you are original) and publish. If you are lucky, the images would fall snug fit in your theme’s layout. If you are not, you’ll have adjust things by either forcing them to display with an akward image resolution. Or you resize them with your favorite image editing program, and upload them a second time. See my hassle-full point? Having a hotlinked-image-free site has been top New Year Resolutions for bloggers (maybe? if they care). But they all succumb to the alternative, a much simpler “Just Hotlink It” motto. JD redesignImages primary objective is to rid your sight of this sacrilegious practice. And with all good things, they come with bonuses. Not only will it cleanse your site, it will also resize your images proportionately, and apply optional filters like grayscale, brightness, contrast, tint and blur. Why would you wanna do something like this? Well, it…

Auto Image Size Reduction Using PHP

redesigndavid — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 06:49:31 +0000

Bravo! Bravo! I knew I can do it. Stayed up late last night, learning PHP code. Haha! I’m no George Malley (from Phenomenon, John Travolta), who devoured an English-Spanish dictionary on a 20 minute drive to a sick lady they all thought was possessed (stomach flu can be the devil), but last night, I set out to accomplish something and today I woke up to find out that it actually worked. I am very much in love with my plain and simple theme. But what readers do not see is underneath this smooth exterior, there’s a violent monster ruthlessly cleaning up content, a.k.a. wordpress’s plugin system. To give you a brief picture, let me explain how images are handled in my blog. First of all, I am extremely lazy. I hate downloading images off unassumming websites, just to re-upload them into mine. I find this completely unnessary. If we are to steal images, I say, why not do it in style? So I spent hours and hours (ironic huh? lazyness pushing me to work for hours! happens all the time) looking to a plugin that would automatically download remote images. The answer? wp super images. I know I out moved a lot of you guys. I had been searching for the plugin and most of the forums show unresolved queries for a such and such plugin. I found it. Here it is. I think, it’s lack of popularity might be due to its EASL developers, Chinese if I’m right. So that’s one part that’s cool! The plugin downloads images from “img” tags and links to images (eg a href equals blah blah). It treats both queries separately too. So if you wanna have a hand on things like me, it’ll be easy for you. Secondly,…

Splitting XYZ from BlendShape Targets

redesigndavid — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 08:39:15 +0000

I was reading an article about an awesome book about facial character setup titled Stop Staring. It’s pretty old. Definitely worth the buy! It describes a method of having to divide the axises of displacement caused by targets. It works simple. Consider a blendshape deformer that makes a vertex move from point A to point B. We will instead make 3 versions of the target shape. With each copy containing displacement coming from only one axis.
This step is achieved using a script. global proc isolateAxisBlend (string $base, string $ini_target, string $axis) { $object = `duplicate -n ($ini_target+"_dup_"+$axis) $ini_target`; $obj = $object[0]; for ($i=0;$i<4570;$i++) { $xform_base = `xform -q -t ($base+".vtx["+$i+"]")`; $xform_obj = `xform -q -t ($obj+".vtx["+$i+"]")`; switch ($axis) { case "yz" : xform -t $xform_base[0] $xform_obj[1] $xform_obj[2] ($obj+".vtx["+$i+"]"); break; case "xz" : xform -t $xform_obj[0] $xform_base[1] $xform_obj[2] ($obj+".vtx["+$i+"]"); break; case "xy" : xform -t $xform_obj[0] $xform_obj[1] $xform_base[2] ($obj+".vtx["+$i+"]"); break; case "z" : xform -t $xform_base[0] $xform_base[1] $xform_obj[2] ($obj+".vtx["+$i+"]"); break; case "x" : xform -t $xform_obj[0] $xform_base[1] $xform_base[2] ($obj+".vtx["+$i+"]"); break; case "y" : xform -t $xform_base[0] $xform_obj[1] $xform_base[2] ($obj+".vtx["+$i+"]"); break; } } } Usage: To use this procedure, copy, paste and run it from the script editor to load the procedure into memory. You’ll need a base shape and a target shape. In MAYA’s MEL command line (or through the script editor), type isolateAxisBlend “nameOfBaseMesh” “nameOfTargetMesh” “axis”. For example: isolateAxisBlend "baseMesh" "targetMesh" "x"; isolateAxisBlend "baseMesh" "targetMesh" "y"; isolateAxisBlend "baseMesh" "targetMesh" "z"; Try this: Create two polygon spheres named “baseMesh” and “targetMesh”. Select “targetMesh” and go to component mode. Select all vertices and scale it so it is twice bigger in all axises. (Remember to do it in component…

Small Developer, Big World

redesigndavid — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 01:08:27 +0000

Programming is all around us. Developers fuel the iPhone and it’s competition, Android. Developers also are the ones responsible for jailbreaking the iPhone. We need developers to write programs for our work, for our banks, for the games we play and for movies we watch. Their work is ubiquitos. And it fattens my heart to know the written word is no longer just a means to communicate between humans, but it is also a means to control applications and, by extension, worlds of organized knowledge. I am a developer with no formal training. I love it. I breath scripting and taste it in my sweat when I run. And the more I program, the more I realize that everything I’ve done, doesn’t even come close to the world of possibilities. Heck, everything created by all of humanity is still insignificant. Especially in comparison to the bench mark set by reality. Developers can only attempt to go to the correct direction. The feeling is as big as a googolplex. If you don’t already know, a googol is a number starting with one an followed by hundred zeros. Big, huh? A googolplex is another number again starting with one, but this time followed by googol of zeros. A philosopher/scientist once supposed it was practically impossible to write one googolplex on paper because there isn’t enough room in this world to fit it in. I think that’s dumb. Haha! But the world of possibilities is to me just as big. Carl Sagan wrote in his book, “a googolplex is precisely as far from infinity as is the number one.” That’s how I feel. Each language I encounter is a beckon call to attempt the impossible. And yet for every success, you realize that even the word “impossible” is…

modCharSetup version 1

redesigndavid — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 06:34:41 +0000

First release of the modCharSetup (short for Modular Character Setup) for Maya is now available for download. Please peruse modCharSetup 101 to learn how to use it. To download the file click here: To install, just unzip the download. Inside you will see a file named autoinstall.cmd. Run this file by double clicking on it. It will install and place all the neccessary scripts in their proper places. In Maya (after a restart, if autoinstall.cmd was invoked while Maya was running), just look for the command line. Make sure you set it to MEL, instead of Python. Type modCharSetup. Press enter. Anytime in the future you wish to run modCharSetup, just type the same command or turn it into a shelf icon. The modCharSetup window should now appear. The last icon brings you to the modCharSetup category in this site. Please fill me in everything regarding your experience with the script.

modCharSetup (v1) 101

redesigndavid — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 04:54:08 +0000

modCharSetup is a Maya Character Setup set of scripts that allows a rigger to automate the setting up of characters in a manner that is modular. Parts of the character are divided into multiple different parts that are independent on their own. Because of this, creating a character with more than two arms or even arms that aren’t connected to the body and instead to the head, probably, has never before been this easy. The entire suite of tools from the script is designed to allow a rigger to finish setting up controls within 30 minutes per character. 1. Create Placers Step one is create your placers. Placers allows us to input the positions of joints and controllers to Maya without necessarily creating th . Everything will be done automatically by the script. You have three kinds of placers that you could use. Each of th representing a specific kind of setup. The first is the Three Joint Limb. The TJL, is the setup for most limbs. You would typically use this for your arms, legs and other similar body appendages with two segments or three joints. Hence, the name. Usage: Click on the Three Joint Limb icon. Provide a name for the set up (e.g. rightArm or leftBunnyEar). Then position each placer created where roughly you’d like to have the joints created.
The TJL, when set up, is…

Quickly Batch Mocap Conversion

redesigndavid — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 10:35:37 +0000

In my thrill in the discovery of the mother load of free motioncapture data, I downloaded all the animations, which were made up of ASF files (skeleton setups) and matching AMC files (motion captured animation). The total download was more than 2 gigabytes. The promised 4 gigabytes might have been due to the multiple versions of the same data. I only downloaded one type. The type I could import into Maya, the ASF’s and their matching AMC’s filetypes. Converting these files meant using programs already made available by CMU from their website. There are two DOS executable files available for download. The first is asf2mel.exe which converts ASF files into a MEL script that builds a joint hierarchy for you. The second is amc2mov.exe which creates another MEL script that sets up the joint hierarchy just created to accept the animation contained in the second file, an MOV. The commands to use the two files are easy to learn. To learn, just peruse the documentation page from MCU mocap lib. You won’t have a hard time. The only difficulty I had was the 2,500+ files I wanted to convert. I knew there was no way in hell I’d be typing commands 2.5 thousands times. Instead I developed a batch sequence that would, in a sense, scan the its own folder for ASF files (files containing skeletons) and then scan the same folder for matching AMC files (files containing motion) and convert them, plus segregate them into folders. Took me about 30 minutes figuring the nine-line script out. But it was well worth it. The computer worked for me for the next three hours converting file after file. If you downloaded a bunch of ASF files and AMC files from CMU Mo-Cap Library and you want to…

Fast, Easy, Flexible UI

redesigndavid — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 09:55:33 +0000

User Interfaces has been around for decades. For a while we had been using text input UI’s. There was a huge following for the voice-activated UI’s. But the most prevalent and most used UI is the graphic UI. People have been reinventing it ever since it’s first conception. So much so that it has been held in heavy regard that UI’s can make or break an OS; and we’ve seen this happen time and again. UI’s also make or break game consoles, even games themselves. I would even go as far as to say (without valid citations) that development for the, CG and UI, should have and have been going hand in hand. (This guy here, Renato Polimeno, has a list of UI’s he compiled from the web in his website.)So wouldn’t it be funny if our rigs would be using primitive UI’s? Aha! I developed a script that automates a system to create a UI for any Maya rig. The method is very promising, and I am here to share it to everyone. As a disclaimer, allow me to just say, the technology is old. I just developed new way to use old methods. As a testament to its simplicity a script could be written to automate the process for just 15 lines. It can even be shorter. But it is the methods behind that I would like to share here. Hopefully, you guys would appreciate it and start using it with your rigs. And since it is so easy, you might even consider adding UIs to rigs that you don’t own. Here is an example of a UI that you could create using this tutorial as a guide. You could design your UI in any way you deem fit. Allow nothing…