Well it's official, off to pastures new after 11 good years at Eurocom. I'm off to Crytek UK in a few months to be their Technical Animation Director, new start, new pipelines and a big challenge, bring it on!

BUG: Just to confirm!!!

2013 SAP rotate Order, here you go! Not good, do NOT INSTALL for animations as you're going to be in a world of pain with this release. Confirmed as a bug with AD.

MAYA 2013SAP : BUG: rotateOrders from Mark Jackson on Vimeo.

BUG 2013 - Huge Bug for Animation

WARNING: we've, or rather Brad's just found a kick ass bug in 2013 SAP release. The rotation orders are broken, doesn't matter what you change them too, gimbal still happens as if it were set to xyz order. Kind of a major bug me thinks, see what AD have to say about it. It's fine in the initial 2013 release.

MasterClass Binder Module updated

Thought I'd share an update to the MasterClass AnimationBinder.py as requested by a friend who was having problems binding up a Quadruped. In the original file that I shipped with the MasterClass there was a call for making the AimBinder node that I show in the class but I never added it to UI call. So this new file has a button, "AimBinder" that builds the complex AimBind for you in one go.

This button call expects 3 nodes selected. The first is the node that you want the bind to aim at, the second is the Controller on the rig you want to drive and the third becomes the parent to the bindNode itself as well as being used to parent an UpVector locator to stop the aim from spinning. Its basically the node as I build manually in the video.

updated AnimationBinder.py

cheers

Mark

Bug: listCameras

Never noticed this bug before, you look in the Camera drop down to select a camera for a panel and some of the cameras show the shape name not the transform, so we did a bit of digging. Turns out the code that builds the Panels>Perspective menu is buggy.

From the code reference: listCameras  
Command to list all cameras. If no flags are given, both perspective and orthographic cameras will be displayed. This command returns an array of camera names. When the transform name uniquely identifies the camera it is used, otherwise the shape name will be returned.

Which is wrong as if you simply parent a cube under a camera transform all of a sudden in the camera menu you'll get perspShape not persp. So who cares right? Well in our case I'm using cmds.modelPanel(self.Panel,q=True,cam=True), which must use the same code under the hood and thus returns the CameraShape node and not the Transform depending on if you have something parented to the camera or not.

Mark

Autodesk 2013 - Released

Just seen that the Autodesk 2013 product drop has finally happened, all now available on the Subscription center!

Taking Animations from 2012 back to 2011

AutoTangent type:

  This is something we discovered last week, to be honest I should have figured it before but as a lot of the data passing between 2012 and 2011 at the studio is baked MoCap nobody spotted this issue. 

The problem is the new 'AutoTangent' type in Maya 2012. So lets say you start animating in 2012 but need to pass that data back to somebody running 2011. We already know Maya binaries between the two are incompatible, so you save and an Ascii file and that works. The issue is that by default in Maya2012 the tangent type is set in the prefs as the new 'AutoTangent'. Now this is great and to be honest a big improvement over the standard spline tangents. BUT.... Maya 2011 doesn't know anything about it. The key data still loads up, but the tangent types of each keyframe in2011 remain unset which means any interpolation between keys you did in 2012 is now screwed! 

 If you intend to do this, go from 2012 back to 2011 DO NOT use AutoTangent when keying.