Lost Animation - part?? 3 ??

So this stupid bloody bug is still showing up in Maya, animation reloading in T-pose, all the animCurves still in the scene but Maya failing to reconnect the data on file load.

We've debugged this so many times in the last 10years I've lost count and yet it still pops up. So I've added more in-depth support for the fix methods in the Red9 Studio Pack.

There's now a new UI that opens up, this has 2 base methods.

Method 1: You're running character sets and referencing, Maya has failed to connect the data up BUT left the animCurves connected to the ReferenceNode.

Method 2: Maya has had a full blown fuck fest and left you with no hint to what data goes where. This method uses the names of the selected objects, and their animatable channels, then looks for all animCurves that may match.

Two flags, StripNamespaces.... does just that, removes the namespaces of the node before doing the curve match (curves are usually in root namespace). StripMergedLayerData, allows for the additional 'Merged_Layer_inputB' naming that animLayers use.

Hopefully that'll save somebodies life, I've had so many emails over these fixes over the last few years it's ridiculous

thanks

Mark

BUG: keyframe cmd with option flag

import maya.cmds as cmds
cube=cmds.polyCube()[0]
cmds.setKeyframe(cube,t=[0,8,25])
cmds.keyframe('%s_visibility' % cube, edit=True, r=True, timeChange=5, time=(0,8), option = "insert")

I'm trying to add to the Red9 animTools and want to be able to offset an entire hierarchies animations in one go, this is already supported however I want to add the ability of specifying a timeRange. Imaging you have a huge chunk of anim data and want to shift a section of it for a character by 10 frames. Currently shifting keys in the timeline won't ripple, it uses the segmentOver and causes a mess. Also you need to have all the objects selected when doing it and there's no numeric input. So I want to add it to the offestTime code.

This is all up and running except I've hit another crash bug, 100% repeatable crash and it boils down to the 'option' flag as used above. Give it a go, boom. Now I accept that in this case the sparse keys are an issue, but really the code should catch this.

cheers

Mark

Another Maya Bug - Resample curve major issues

Hopefully you've all seen the new interactive curve filtering I've been working on for the Red9 StudioPack linked above, if not I recommend you watch it if you're ever dealing with dense MoCap data.

Anyway as I was doing this I noticed another bug in the way Maya is managing curve data, thought I had to share this to warn all you animators of the effect of using the 'resampleCurve' to run a bake on dense data.



Ignore the UI, this is a prototype of a new build which will manage filtering on steps, something that's been requested by a few people. What you're seeing here is just the slider pumping values directly into the standard Maya Resample Curve option....what the way the curve shifts in time as you increase the steps!!!!!!

Don't believe me, try it!

I've logged this as a bug so we'll have to see what happens.

cheers

Mark

Maya MObjectHandle

I've been fighting a crash bug in the Red9 MetaData for a while now and finally found the solution! The issue is that in the base class I cache the MObject in the node which means that if you reload the scene, or do a scene new, or reload reference etc that MObject pointer becomes invalid and Maya crashes whenever you try and call it. I really wanted to nail this issue as MetaData is absolutely at the core of all the work we're doing at Crytek.

So I did some digging and found the MObjectHandle class!! brilliant, it's a class designed specifically to test the health/validity of MObjects, basically now I'm caching both the MObject and an MOjectHandler for it, all the calls now just run a really simple test before using the MObject:

MObjectHandle.isValid()

Brilliant, all I have to do is raise a good warning and the bug is crushed, should make things a lot more stable hopefully!

cheers

Mark

Red9 Studio Pack v1.27 released!

Well I've finally finished the Red9 Studio Pack v1.27 release so Happy Christmas to you all!

See details here: http://red9-consultancy.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/its-done-happy-christmas-all.html

Download either follow the link of the Red9 blog or grab it at CreativeCrash:

http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/downloads/scripts-plugins/animation/c/red9-studio-pack

Have a great Christmas, any questions or feedback just nag me!

Mark

Animation Binder integrated to Red9

With the next build of Red9 Studio Pack (v1.27) I've integrated my AnimationBinder MasterClass toolkit into the setup, means I can expand it a little and make use of the rest of the pack. I added a small fix to the bake calls too, it now runs Euler filters and delete static for curves after the bake to try and clean up the resulting rig data.

cheers

Mark

Red9 Studio Pack!

Red9 Studio Pack : 
Well time to come clean, as some of you already know I've been writing my own Studio Tools setup for Maya and thought it about time I actually put my name to it! Whats in it, god where do I start, lots of tools for Animators, Rig management, MetaData API, Pose Library and it's expanding daily as it's gradually battered more and more at work. For more details check the Red9 Blog in my links, at some point I'll merge both Vimeo channels and maybe blogs, either that or I'll leave the Red9 blog just for the pack.

They'll be a big update in the next week or two and I'm starting to do a ton of new demo videos. For those of you who've been testing the build thankyou, if anybody wants more info drop me a mail.

cheers

Mark