Well I think I'm finally happy with the build to release, another one packed with fixes and new features. The big one for this is the addition of an audio compiler, thanks to the guys at pydub and particularly James Robert for the additional methods in the pydub module. Open source rocks when you can tap the brains of others like that.
So for those who didn't read the previous post the AudioCompiler, found in the red9 sound menu in the Trax Editor, is designed to allow you to have multiple sound tracks in Maya and playblast the damn things!! All you do is run the compiler which will generate a brand new wav file and activate it, more over if you've already run it it will just continually update the currently compiled file.
There's also a lot of extra work done on the PoseSaver (as always!) this seems to be getting a lot of use around the community and I'm really keep to push it as far as possible. In this build you'll find a new option on the rmb menu, Pose Blender... yes does exactly that, allows you to mix in, interactively, a percentage of any pose. At the moment this is limited to non-relative poses as it's mixing the values and not doing any world-space calculation. Even so it's ideal for facial or finger poses. It'll also work with the hierarchy checkbox off so you can dial in percentages of a pose on selected nodes only.
I've also exposed the 'maintain parents' functionality to all, if you take a look in the Morpheus or Stewart presets you'll see a new block, [rig data] it's kind of self explanatory once you see it. It's just another entry that tells the code what attributes to hold during pose Loading.
More fixes to the Mirror setups too, as we batter the hell out of this stuff at work I keep catching issues, or rather Rob Howes does, always nice to sit next to somebody coding with your stuff on a day to day basis who'll quite happily slap me and get me to fix stuff there and then!
Anyway, as usual the release is on the Google drive, just follow the download link.
I'd love to hear from more people running this stuff, experiences of using it and suggestions, I also need to hear from more folk on MacOS or Linux. Big thanks to all those who send nice messages and suggestions, it's because of these that I do this and that many of the features get implemented, such as the poseMixer.
Enjoy
Mark
Red9 StudioTools have been born out of frustration at Autodesks reluctancy to add some of these core features and workflows into Maya itself. Why OpenSource, well I want to give something back to the industry as I feel damn sorry for studios without the benefit of a large R&D department to craft pipelines around them. The Studio Pack is designed to speed up a modern animation pipeline. All comments and suggestions are welcomed. For more info mail me :)
