Updates.... gearing up for a new release

Been a while since I posted any updates so wanted to keep you all abreast of what's been happening to the pack. There's been huge development gone into the core of this recently, lots of UI updates and workflow cleanup to make it all a bit slicker in general.

PoseSaver has had a lot of work and now lets you load poses in relative space. The idea is that you select a node you know to be part of a saved pose, I then allow you to load the pose such that that selected node remains in place, the pose is loaded relative to it. This has 2 options for rotate and translates which both allow either 'projected' or 'absolute' calculations. Projected does just that, for rotates it calculates the global direction (relative to the current working up axis), in general that's the Y-axis direction. So you select a node, I workout the difference between it's current direction and it's stored direction, then apply the pose to compensate that difference, in effect locking the node in place. If 'absolute' is selected then rather than calculating the general direction, I just apply the pose completely around that selected node, allowing rotate in all axis. Similar thing happens for translates, either relative to the groundplane, or absolute, allowing vertical offsets.

Now like most of the tools the posesaver relies on the filter being set in Tab2 (above). To help I've unlocked the Node Priorities field and allowed you to set those up from selected nodes. The Node Priorities are CRUCIAL for PoseLoading in relative space as I often need to know the order in which transforms are applied. Lets say in a general rig the Hips are a child of the Root ctrl, so if I offset the Hips BEFORE the Root then you end up with double transforms and screwed up data. This is where the priorities come in, in the above, I'm specifying that root_control is processed before hip_control. You only need to set priorities on those groups that may cause this double transform.

You'll also notice that in the searchPattern above there's a new operator 'NOT:' this is way of excluding nodes that match everything else in the filter. So in the above, L_Arm_IKBlend_cont would match the filter 'cont', but because it's also specified as 'NOT:IKIKBlend' it is then excluded. This is a great addition to the filters and is also going in the attribute search as we speak. In fact for the attr search I'm also going to add a '=' operator as well so you can also catch specific attrs with specific values.

MetaData has had more upgrades. Lots of work gone into the core of the MetaClass. mNode in the class is now a property that wraps the MObject itself, so it doesn't matter if you rename of parent the node, the object will always be in sync. I've also allowed the message attribute handler in the _getattribute__ block  to return both sides of any message links. This was needed as I've been testing the idea of casting the HIK characterProperties node to metaData and using it as our internal skeleton definition setup, but that node is wired such that the node is the child not the parent of the joints, hence the change.

Lots of other things happening so I'll keep you posted

cheers

Red