Red Studio Pack v1.10

I've just rolled out a new build of the pack which should show up in the Download folder and also on CreativeCrash.

This is a big release for the Animation and NodeSearch code. After doing more Vimeo demos I caught a number of bugs in the way the logic was running that didn't feel right so I've hopefully made it all a little clearer. I've fixed the HIK support in this release, I took it out in v1.09 as I was trying to find a neater way of dealing with all the HIK callbacks, all the Animation functions should now work as they would on any other rig system. Also added support for CharacterSets and SelectionSets which can now be used as the root selection for the Hierarchy filters. Makes it easy dealing with rigs where you have neat keying selectionSet groups as you can just select a source and destination set and run the Hierarchy filters and thus all the AnimationUI tools between those 2 sets.

See the Vimeo channel for the latest demos.

Happy Christmas!

Rig Handling: Another Day Another Video

Well hopefully this will explain the Rig Handling a little better within the systems. The main thing to understand is what and how the hierarchy filters in the Red9 pack do. These are extremely powerful filters that run in unison to pinpoint nodes within a hierarchy structure based on nodeTypes, nodeAttributes and nodeNames (this one is a RegEx search string). This is an intersection search. The idea is that to properly transfer data between complex rigs we need to be able to identify the nodes to be processed within those systems. Note that these filters will processes from a selected RootNode OR from CharacterSets and SelectionSets!

The behaviour of all the Hierarchy checkboxes in the main AnimationUI are controlled by these filters. There's a few presets to get you started, filters can be made, tested and stored. If you don't want to get too technical then for rigs just used the Standard Rig preset. This will filter the hierarchy for nurbsCurve based controllers.

This also goes through the various methods of transferring animation and pose data between animation rigs.

Big thanks to Nigel and the guys at MotionCircus for letting me test this out on one of their production rigs.

New Vimeo Video: Track and Stabilizer

Here's another video showing the Tracking and Stabilizer functionality of the AnimtionUI. This is a very powerful yet simple little tool for managing the interaction of nodes in Maya. Allows tracking at a Component level in Maya, so you can select a poly on a character and lock a controller to it's surface over time.

New Vimeo Channel

At last, I'm starting to do demo Videos and have just setup a Vimeo channel. Over the next few weeks I'll add many more hopefully! This first one demonstrates a few of the new features in v1.08.

V1.08 now released

Well another version has just been uploaded with a number of new features. I've also setup a Vimeo channel which I'll drop the link for once the demos are online.

CopyKey and CopyAttr - these now have a new checkbox 'toMany' which allows you to copy animation data from the first selected node, to ALL subsequently selected nodes, duplicating/syncing the animation / attrs to all. This was initially in v1.07 but there was a bug in the processing.

TimeOffset. Added functionality to allow you to offset the animation of selected nodes in a flocking behaviour, adding the offset to each subsequent node processed. Also added a randomizer to the TimeOffset, the offset entered is passed to a random function before the animdata is offset. Random will offset the curves between 0 and the offset entered.

As always, all suggestions and feedback welcomed.

Red