I kept the rig somewhat simple, working just with rigging methods I already knew from working with Max and Maya. The rig is just a body rig at this point in time, although I plan on creating a facial rig for it in the future as well.

I have been finding Digital Tutors great in helping with my transition to Maya. I highly recommend their lessons. They work well as a rough guideline, but there are definitely better ways of doing some things. I found better solutions to some basic problems as my confidence with Maya grew throughout the course of creating the rig. I also found a few of the methods taught were actually flawed: the spine twist and eye rig. It gave a great opportunity to actually play around and find a working solution on my own though. Pleased to have gotten those issues fixed and working. Despite the problems, I am still very happy with their product.

Hope you like the rig. I look forward to doing more and continuing to grow in Maya.

Macros include:

• Paint weights enable/disable
  • Alternate execute brings up brush options
• Paint blend weights enable/disable
• Always Deform enable/disable
• Enable All Always Deforms
• Disable All Always Deforms
• Remove Zero Weights
  • Very handy for quick access, as running this allows you to then subtract weights without worrying about those weights being added back to random bones which you have previously told not to affect those verts.
• Open Weight Tool
• Grow Selection
• Shrink Selection
• Loop Selection
• Ring Selection
• Export Weights
  • Alternate execute saves file to temporary location to be able to essentially just use this to copy all the weights for the current skin modifier.
• Import Weights
  • Alternate execute loads file from the temporary location where export saved to, essentially allowing you to paste all weights for the current skin modifier.
• Bake All Verts
  • Bakes all verts for the current skin modifier. This takes into account the fact that the skin modifier can be instanced across several objects, and bakes the verts on all of these objects.
• Select Influenced Verts
  • Selects all vertices which are being influenced in some way by the currently selected bone. This works as an “add to selection”, so you can select a bone and tell it to select influenced verts, select another bone and run again to add verts influenced by that bone to your vert selection.
• Remove Null Bones
  • Skin wrap is a great tool for quickly getting skinning for a high res mesh from a low res mesh, or getting a quick skinning solution for accessories which should be following the character’s deformations. Unfortunately, it adds all bones used in the skinning solution of the object being wrapped to, regardless of whether or not the object being wrapped needs them. If it is something small, such as a button, it likely only requires one or two bones and the rest of the bones are not doing anything. This macro provides a quick clean up by removing any bones from the skin modifier that are not influencing any verts.
• Pressure Sensitivity Enable/Disable
• Export Bones
  • Sometimes skinning solutions become corrupt and need to be started again. Using this and Import Bones, below, in combination with Export Weights/Import Weights will allow you to very quickly and easily transfer your skinning to a new mesh without missing a beat. Simply clone the mesh, export your bones, export your weights, add a skin modifier to the mesh clone, import bones, import weights, and you are right back where you left off without a corrupted skinning solution.
• Import Bones
• Select Envelope
  • Emulates Maya’s quick envelope selection tool. Simply hover your mouse over the envelope you wish you select and run the macro; it does a number of calculations to determine which of the bones in the skin modifier was closest to your mouse at the time of evaluation. NOTE: The tool does not work off of the envelopes’ positions, rather the center position of the actual node that the envelope represents. The reason for this is that I could not find any methods to get the positions of the envelopes. If you have moved your envelopes far from their original positions, the accuracy of your selection will decrease.

Download Here

Macros can be found under the category “facerFX Skinning Quickies”

This tool gives you mass batch processing over your materials. You can press a single button and get a list of all the materials in your scene, select 24 all at once, and then press another button and they all are instantly transferred over into the material editor for you to work with.

The tool is compatible with material libraries. You can load several material libraries from a single directory all at once, and then export them all back out to a single library if wanted. There is also a material renaming tool, quick renaming utility which just renames them to the same name as the object they’re assigned to, as well as other useful quick tools.

Download Here

Macros can be found under “facerFX Tools”

I made this tool back in college when first learning MAXScript. It was just a good easy script to quickly organize entire scenes based on object and layer naming conventions.

How the tool works is it cycles through each layer in the layer manager, collects any nodes in the scene which contain the layer’s name in their object name, and then adds those nodes to the respective layer. Doing a lot of rigging, this made it possible to sort the entire rig into layers at the click of a button. Set up a layer called “Character_HLP” and then prefix all helper objects in the rig with “Character_HLP”. When the tool is called on, all of those helper objects will go into the “Character_HLP” layer.

Download Here

Macros can be found under “facerFX Tools”

- Just updated script to work with new format for tool release so I could get it back up on the site. Nothing else has changed. Still very bare bones.

I have done a lot of other work within the last year, but some of it cannot be shown yet, and I wanted to get a quick update done. I will likely create a new reel once the other work has the go-ahead to be shown. Who knows when that will be though! In the meantime, please enjoy…

As mentioned above, I used to own old-school Graphire tablets. They were only the smalls sizes, and I only ever used them for creating texture maps. I never thought of using them in Max because I just couldn’t see how navigating 3d space could comfortably work. I’ve had my Graphire4 sitting around since college, collecting dust, and had never even considered trying it for skinning.

After mapping my main pen button to middle-click and secondary button to right-click navigating 3d is a breeze. I’m still not totally comfortable with it yet, but am quickly adapting. I’ve started building more small macros for skinning so I can quickly access tools through quads with my pen rather than having to visit the modify panel for things that I often would with my mouse.

The pen is a completely different workflow from the mouse. Its a lot more free-flowing and really speeds things up. I’m finding lots of slow spots with my workflow that I never noticed before when using a mouse.

Anyways, happy with my purchase and would recommend others to try out their tablets too. It will feel weird at first, but give it a day or two before giving up on it. Make sure you install your latest tablet drivers, enable pressure sensitivity, and set it to affect strength when skinning. The pressure sensitivity settings can be found in your painter options in Max.

On a related note: the multi-touch input is a cool gimmick, but sucks terribly with Max. Don’t expect much from it.

This is a tool I put together because sometimes you have to work with modifiers on multiple nodes and the modifiers aren’t at the very top of the stack. You’re constantly having to select the node and then selecting the proper modifier. Prime example of this is when you have a turbosmooths on top of all of your geometry while you are either skinning or modelling. It would be much easier, and save quite a bit of time, if every time you selected a node you just automatically were on the skin modifier or edit poly modifier.

Enter this tool! This is exactly what we have here. This tools works off of modifier class and also has an option for checking the modifier’s name using a “Has string” search. Baseobject has also been added to the modifier list, so you can automatically go right to the bottom of the stack.

Download Here

Macros can be found under “facerFX Tools”

February 28, 2010 – v2.02

- Fixed typo in selectModifier function. Was passing argument to navigateModStack function as findMod when in the navigateModStack definition it was actually findModifier. Was causing tool to not work with multiple nodes selected.

February 26, 2010 – v2.01

- Made it so with multiple selected objects, if it doesn’t find the modifier instance after walking down the stack, it walks back up to the top so the user doesn’t have the bottom modifier auto-selected.

February 25, 2010 – v2.0

- Cleaned up code for re-release.

- Added functionality when multiple nodes selected.

- Made selectModifier and selectBaseobject two different functions.