You’ve got red on you

Posted by Mat on Aug 31, 2010 in Featured, Projects | 2 comments

I have been spending the last little while learning Maya, and have just finished up my first Maya rig. You’ll recognize the character as Shaun, from Shaun Of The Dead. Modeling was done by Stephan Perreault – www.stephanperreault.com

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.

Skinning Quickies

Posted by Mat on Aug 24, 2010 in 3D Studio Max, Featured | 2 comments

This is a collection of macros for completing quick tasks while skinning. Most of these are just simple tasks found in the modify panel for skin which did not have macros already available, but there are still some custom ones in the mix. I decided to put this together when starting to use my new Wacom tablet for skinning, as it was annoying to always have to go to the UI to accomplish some of these tasks.

Macros include:

Material Manager

Posted by Mat on Aug 5, 2010 in 3D Studio Max | 5 comments

Here is another tool I made back in college which has been useful over the years. The reason I made this tool is because I was annoyed with the limit of only 24 material slots in the material editor, and the inefficiency of getting those materials in and out of the editor. If you wanted to get 24 materials into the material editor, you’d have to go pick them one at a time.

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.

Quick Layer Organizer

Posted by Mat on Aug 4, 2010 in 3D Studio Max | 1 comment

Current Version: v2.0 – August 4, 2010

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.

Demo Reel – July 2010

Posted by Mat on Jul 30, 2010 in Demo Reels, Featured | 3 comments

I have updated my last reel to include characters I rigged and skinned (body only, facial rigs done by Paul Neale) for an Actimel Commercial. I also added in a demo of the mirror rig tool I was working on in spare time a few months back.

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…

Mirror Rig Script Demo

Posted by Mat on Apr 5, 2010 in Featured, R&D | 7 comments

This script is still a WIP, and I’m not sure that it will ever officially be considered complete because there seems to be a new problem waiting around every corner. You can see, after the mirroring is done, that on the mirrored leg there is still a few twist helpers not properly aligned and one of the bone chains for the foot are orientated backwards. Solve one and run into another! But, its still fun trying, and it is working half-decently right now, so I thought it would be cool to put together a video of it in action.

The video shows the script processing with a “sleep” command embedded in the for-loop that is mirroring the rig. I put the sleep command in so that you can tell there are no camera tricks with clever cuts being made, as well as to actually have something to look at. Without the sleep it would literally just be me pressing a button, waiting 20 seconds or so, then the other half of the rig appearing magically. Not quite as interesting to watch :)

Using StretchTM

Posted by Mat on Mar 28, 2010 in Featured, Tutorials | 4 comments

StretchTM is a useful property found on nodes, but it is somewhat hidden. It is particularly useful for bones.

In this video I cover two uses of the StretchTM matrix. I show how you can set up bones to stretch along with another bone, as well as how to change the wirecolor of a bone based on how far it has been stretched.