zooTools make character rigging a breeeze!

Hamish McKenzie (macaroniKazoo) has put out a new release of his tools, now written in Python as well as good ‘ol Mel–YAY!  This is big news since it’s been a whole year since another version has been publicly released!  It’s good to know that someone out there is still enthusiastic about sharing with the online community what he’s learned and developed over a long period of time.  I hope to bring something as useful to the proverbial table one day.  Guess I better keep hitting the books and learn from great the great ones!  I feel like such a noob in comparison and it’ll take years to catch up with these guys.

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Do you smell what the rock is cookin'?

Halo Reach is finally out and i’ve been on it almost every day since it came out this week.  I am now a proud owner of the Legendary edition!  Flame-on!  Let’s hope I can keep up my work  Working on Halo even in a relatively limited fashion, not being on the Bungie team but Image Metrics, is quite satisfying.

Working a technical directing capacity on this game gave me a chance to further develop my pymel prowess and write some tools for me and another team member to use to integrate Reach scenes into our animation pipeline.  Doing this drastically cut down the amount of time to process what seemed like close to a hundred scenes.  Here are a couple of examples of pymel GUIs I put together to run the tools.

Check out these links on Reach:

CNN THR

 

Fresh tutorial on the web.  I just thought i’d stop by cgbootcamp after remembering that i’d bookmarked a Maya realtime shader tutorial on their Vimeo a while back.  I was surprised to see that they had just put up a brand new tutorial finishing up their series on writing a cgfx shader.

This site is great stuff indeed!  The shaders and videos are there free for the learning!  This inspires me to do spread knowledge of what i’m learning around all the more.  It’s fun to share and why not when you can make a little extra money in the process off of ads and donations.

I will be keeping an eye on these guys in the weeks to come and possibly doing my part to make sure they keep it up.  They make shader writing look sexy!  I’m gonna have to try this in my free time.