LockChannlesUI and AttrMaps

Another Vimeo video! This one goes through the LockChannelsUI which is fairly self explanatory hopefully. It also covers the concept of the AttrMap which for riggers is a godsend, a way of storing out the status of every channel in a hierarchy and restoring it when needed. The attrMap can be stored to file OR serialized to a node on the rig itself!

 

cheers

Mark

Advanced Channel Management and attrMaps

I've been doing some more work on the channel management / LockChannelsUI and have come up with something pretty interesting. For those who don't know what this tool does, it's for managing what attributes, per node, are locked, keyable or hidden. There's nothing worse than getting a rig that has lots of sub-nodes with open channels for animators to abuse, this is aimed at doing something about that.

The first half is pretty standard and obvious, what channels in the hierarchy, or selected, do you want to manage. There's a specificAttr's field with RMB popup that allows you to grab attrs from the channelBox to include in the filter.

The cool bit is the attrMap. Lets say you're a rigger and have very carefully gone and locked everything you can from the animators but now need to unlock stuff to manage or tweak your setup, or you now have a new rig and want to lock the same attrs per node. With this you can select the top of your rig hierarchy, check the hierarchy box and store an attrMap for the entire setup. This stores the l,k,u,cb state of every attr, for every node in the hierarchy to an attrMap init file. The load restores each attributes status, either at a selected node level from the map, or for the entire hierarchy.

Now you can select the top of your rig, unlock and unhide everything so you can mess around, then just restore the attr status's from the attrMap afterwards!


Red

Beta1 now released

New Beta is now up linked off the download post. With this comes a much easier setup and a few new goodies. The install will now mount a new menu for you at the top of Maya menu's linking to the Python UI's. Demo videos are nearly ready to go up that will explain things a lot easier as theres a lot of functionality behind these toolkits!

New stuff:

• There's now a handy new ToolKit for managing the keyability and visibility of Translate, Rotate and Scale channels on mass for a complete node hierarchy

• The SearchUI has been modified to try and simplify it a little, the 3 filter parts hopefully make more sense now.
• The AnimationUI now has a ton of fixes in it and a new TimeOffset tool for managing time either at a scene level, or on selected nodes. These nodes can be either transforms, sound, clips, all are dealt with at the same time.

As always all comments and requests are always welcome