Fighting the urge to be unproductive, I locked myself in the house for the past few days to get some work done on a new character TD demo.  Been under the weather anyhow and didn’t feel like doing much else, not even surf *gasp!*.  Here it is in all it’s beautiful animator friendly simplicity.  I plan on extending this demo with character animation tools.  I can’t wait to get away from creating demos and rendering video and go back to actually programming and rigging stuff!  I have so much more advanced rigging techniques to show and some that haven’t gotten to a finished stage on my characters yet so stay tuned.

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From Director/Animator Alex Curtis comes his debut animated short that I luckily got to work on as a freelance pro bono character rigger/td.  Here’s a work in progress reel and Kaylee the character I rigged and supervised rigging the hair and goggles with the help of my friend Suchan.  Keep in mind this demo is months old at this point and a newer one is out that is password protected so I cannot share until later.

Kaylee showin' off her moves

Stay tuned!  The final is looking good!  Should be any day now…

 

Suchan, a buddy from Nepal, just broke the independent game dev facial performance capture animation barrier.  He deserves kudos for getting it to this stage.  This would be such a valuable asset to any gaming company if he brings it to the next level or even at this stage I suspect.  Suchan is on a solo climb of Mount Mocap and while he is a base camp right now, I expect he could make the difficult summit by himself!    Nice job!

I wonder how much harder it would be to actually be able to do facial mocap from your smart phone directly to a character in Maya or Unity app without any markers, to me that’s Everest.  It is, however, a tangible goal these days for developers and all the freely available mocap tech that’s on the market these days.

 

This demo illustrates the steps taken to develop a character from concept sketches to finished facial rig in a simplified format. This is an actual rig I developed with the use of proprietary rigging tools in Maya utilized daily at work so I’m not going to demo those tools. However, future installments will incorporate the use of tools that I have written and that you can use to aide the building of complex facial rigs such as this, and include overviews of more advanced rigging techniques. I would also like to break the process down into chunks to really go into more detail about things you should be thinking about if you are trying to rig a face. This is an ongoing process so stay tuned, I have lot’s of useful tips to share.

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Find Out How to Turn Custom Text to Realistic Metallic Objects

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Use windows clipboard data in your Maya Python scripts or other generic python.

Dependencies:
setuptools – You should have setuptools installed.
pip – If you have setuptools and/or use easy_install switch to pip by using easy_install to download and install pip, you won’t be sorry.  Pip is awesome, setuptools sux.
pyWin32 – Use pip to download pyWin32 from the commandline using pip install pyWin32.  Copy the installation to your Maya site-packages folder including any .pth, .txt, or .egg-info files.  Tip:  open .pth files in a text editor of choice and check out where pip’s libs are.

'''
based on mel script found here: http://bit.ly/e4qdyH
'''
import win32clipboard

def getClipboardData():
 win32clipboard.OpenClipboard()
 d = win32clipboard.GetClipboardData( win32clipboard.CF_TEXT )
 win32clipboard.CloseClipboard()
 return d
getClipboardData()

def putClipboardData(text):
 win32clipboard.OpenClipboard()
 win32clipboard.EmptyClipboard()
 win32clipboard.SetClipboardText( text )
 win32clipboard.CloseClipboard()
t= 'test text'
putClipboardData(t)

This is based on what I found on teacup’s techy art stuff, written a while ago. I though it deserved an update, plus I needed it for something specific. It is a really handy module to have in your repertoire.  I posted these in a hurry so you probably need to add in some checks to make sure the datatype you are trying to retrieve is text only or else you’ll get errors.

PyQt and Qt obviously are way more powerful for getting other types of data including pixmap and slew of others.  This is simplified for a specific purpose.  Maybe soon I will be able to post a Qt version including drag and drop functionality.

 

Here’s a script I wrote for adding sub-directories of paths I’ve already added to the sys.path in my userSetup.py.

I’m just starting to code seriously in python and it seems like just getting everything to work right in Maya without a lot of fuss is pretty daunting for a beginner with little outside help except for the internet and a couple books.

As my Script Repo develops over time, I don’t want to have to keep worrying about PYTHONPATH having everything in it so I tell it where the root directories are and this script does the rest.

Hope somebody finds this helpful!

import sys
from os import walk
path = ja_python_paths
for p in path:
 for root, dirs, files in walk(p):
 if p is not root:
 sys.path.append(root)

#You can add an optional print statement at the end
#to see what it's doing...

if p is not root:
 print 'adding', root, 'to sys.path'
 sys.path.append(root)

 

Lately, I’ve been working on learning how to develop PyQt UI tools with Maya. Since I work with Maya 2009 daily, I have had to do quite a lot of digging to find out how things were implemented smoothly for it to work with that version. Hopefully, this makes it easier to understand and appreciate it in 2011 and *gasp* :-O 2012, where PyQt is fully integrated! Anyway, if you are in the same predicament, then I should be able to help, send comments and emails my way.

 

userSetup.mel, userSetup.py Tutorial Part 2: Theory and Practical Use

For the Advanced user:

Delving into what how userSetup files work can be tedious.  That’s why i’m posting how to configure Maya properly for those people who are perpetually scratching their heads, trying to figure out what way is better or why things aren’t working out like they planned.  Check out my previous post on userSetup and see if you are pondering things after reading all of that.  Of course, i’ve learned some things about the process too since then because my startup process is a lot more complicated than sourcing a couple of tools.  I’m setting up whole programming environments!  Learning Maya startup configuration has been a process of trial and error, searching and finding or sometimes not finding.  Here’s the beef.  Maya loads script paths in a specific order.  Once you learn that order, the daunting task of setting configurations for a whole studio is as simple as pie.  I work at a smaller studio, so the process of discovery falls on my shoulders and so I had to rise to the challenge.

Case Study: Finding the Solution to a Problem with userSetup.py

So where do you find the source code to decipher what’s really going on when Maya starts up?  After finding this relic of a thread online, It crystallized one piece of the puzzle.  I was having the hardest time figuring out why PYTHONPATH wasn’t working for all my scripts.  After all, I was pointing it to find my userSetup.py and also my Maya2011 python\libs\site-packages directory so I can have access to all my downloaded modules yet my PyQt modules were failing to import while my userSetup modules were sourcing just fine.

Here's the order of how Maya finds scripts for python taken from the post
linked above, which is directly from module: maya.app.startup.basic

Per-version prefs scripts dir (eg .../maya8.5/prefs/scripts)
Per-version scripts dir (eg .../maya8.5/scripts)
User application dir (eg .../maya/scripts)
Look for userSetup.py in the search path and execute it in the
"__main__" namespace
Set up sys.path to include Maya-specific user script directories.
Set up auto-load stubs for Maya commands implemented in libraries
which are not yet loaded
Run the user's userSetup.py if it exists
Register code to be run on exit

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