23 February, 2010

Animatable Pivot System


This is a working demo of my solution for animatable pivot in Maya. I believe it is quite flexible and fast. It allows animators to shift pivots very easily and only one object needs to be keyed. No adjacent two key mechanism necessary, but you can do it if you want.

Most of the logic is implemented using Node network. There is one sctiptJob for each pivot which calls a function. This function is very small and common for all pivots hence no multiple expressions. And the only thing this mel function does is to add the value to the offset to create a new offset which then can be keyed. So there is very minimal mel footprint. All the calculations including matrix multiplication, finding how much object will move, calculate temporary offset etc are done via nodes. I should probably make a single node out of this later.

I will post a video showing the usage of this method.

4 comments:

  1. this is interesting stuff mate ! :)

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  2. Thanks. I am soon going to make an automated python version of it. I am just solving some referencing issues.

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  3. I really would like a detail video on how to get this done step by step .

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