Source on GitHub

Its been a while and I doubt I'll keep this up to date. 

I've posted the sources for some of my older tools on GitHub.

Scott Eaton: Portraiture and Facial Anatomy for Artists

I recently had the pleasure of completing the 3 day Portraiture and Facial Anatomy course with Scott Eaton, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Scott shared a wealth of knowledge on facial anatomy - how to recognise and understand various landmarks on the face for construction and deformation, variations on the bell curve, the differences between gender, race and species, as well as FACS breakdowns and so much more.

Here's an overview of the construction task over the three days.

Blocking in the Temporalis, Masseter, Medial and Lateral Pterygoids.

Adding the eyeballs, orbital fat, superior and inferior Tarsus, Levator tendon, Canthus and Orbicularis oculi. Also, cleaning up where the Masseter joins the Zygomatic bone.

Adding the Frontalis, Procerus, Corrugator supercilii (should have been under the frontalis), Orbicularis oris, Buccinator and Buccal fat (far too much!).

Adding Zygomaticus major and minor, Depressor labii inferioris, Depressor anguli oris, Mentalis, Levator labii superioris and chin fat (for the mentalis).

I need to practice noses!

Here are a few links you may want to bookmark;

• scott-eaton.com/category/bodies-in-motion
• scott-eaton.com/tutorials
• bodiesinmotion.photo
• FACS

Python in Maya: Simple node sorting

When applying a worldspace or relative transform to nodes in Maya, you'll often have to account for;

1. Control behaviour type (IK, Pole Vectors etc)
2. Control hierarchy

This is where you will probably need to look at sorting your list of nodes prior to applying the data.
Also, space-switch sorting will want to be run as an additional pass over control type and hierarchy. This dependency check will vary based on the type of space-switch setup the rigs are using.

I've added a simple sort setup with individual and combined priorities.
Edit: Enable web view if browsing on mobile.

I'd love to hear your thoughts and how you approach this task.

Huh... I forgot this thing still existed.

So, we've finally released Total War: Warhammer.

What a project! Huge amount of work and fun!
Very proud to have worked on this game, and to work with so many talented developers.


Perhaps I'll give this blog another go.

a nice alternative to a quick Rigid Bodies sim: Dynamica Plugin

If you're after a quick little rigidbody sim, I'd suggest giving this a try. Simple, quick, fairly consistent and reliable (so far!).
Just make sure you keep organised and clean the scene up straight after baking, crashes do happen...

Details:
http://bulletphysics.org/mediawiki-1.5.8/index.php/Maya_Dynamica_Plugin

Downloads:
https://code.google.com/p/dynamica/downloads/list

Siggraph 2011 vid:
http://mbakr.squarespace.com/blog/siggraph-2011-destruction-dynamics-for-film-and-game-product.html

quick update

Been mega busy last 6 months, alot of changes, not much time to work on personal stuff, but had a great learning curve so plenty to look into once things slow down.

[Maya][Python] Querying soft selection

Handy little script modified from here to query and select the soft selection influenced components.


This one instead returns the influenced objects. Great for quickly querying the objects within a specific distance of another object.