Eggroll setup update

I meant to post this for a while, but never got around to finish a demo of it. Inspired by Mike Best's eggroll setup, I wanted to do a similar setup because it was a good challenge. After my previously failed attempt I switched to a special matrix(found from google) to calculate rotation of the object around an axis using maya expression. This worked very well and I finally got the rolling working. However I still had some minor problem with small offset from the ground in some positions, it might be the pivot location that might be off. But more challenging is the sliding problem, though it's not very noticeable in the demo. I would like to come back to it later. Deformation of the egg should not be difficult to add to this setup as I am already counting in the bounding box volume in nodes calculation.

Later Mike was kind enough to share the script which gave me insight into his setup. Mine is not as good as his, but I was happy to get the egg rolling :)

This challenge sparked my interest in rigid body simulation. Hopefully in the future I will be able to take time into reading more about it (and begin to understand something!) to write my own little simulator. I am looking particularly for a real egg rolling simulation where the center of mass of rigid body is shifting based on the properties of the fluid (egg yolk and egg white).

Bare essential commands that create Maya's scene

If you open .MA maya file in notepad, you will see many lines of code based on your scene size. If you go through the code, no matter how big the scene is or how many nodes are there, the whole scene is created by only 4 commands! That's it! It's very easy to find this information, but what amazes me is that the programmers were able to abstract the logic of scene creation to the following atomic tasks:

1. Creating nodes with parenting info
2. Adding attributes
3. Setting changed attributes
4. Connecting the nodes

It is very easy to generate .MA style code by following the example of MA exporter plugin. I am using some parts of it in Rigenerator to save the part of the rig as code. My next goal is to be able to analyze this code and extract metadata information for each line. This will allow me to extract scene graph information by just looking at the code. So I am currently in process of designing the logic for a code parser module which will parse the code to extract node/attribute/connection information.