Rigging and Animation Scripts

A tool I made to help out animators on New World as an example of more recent work. Password on resume, same password used for animation demo reel.

A quick demo where I recreated a quick prop rig tool I made for my team, and an overview of the code behind it. Warnings in PyCharm are from some functions using cmds instead of pymel, cmds needs run within an open session of Maya, but cleaning that up isn't worth the time outside a studio environment. 

• 00:00 Noble woman rig/character pipeline snapshot. Note this is setup for a mix and match pipeline, so bits of skin showing underneath the dress are just preview artifacts. Shown animation is a range of motion test.
  One interesting challenge was getting the underskirt to come out from underneath the overgarment when the character crosses their legs to kneel. In 2D, overlap is handling by a sorting order on each image, so having the skirt overlap in part of the animation then be overlapped in another part is trickier than 3D. Because of the leg cross, the middle vertices need to be able to move over the edge without resulting in a distorted/inside out mesh.
  The solution I used was to split the skirt into two pieces with different sort orders. Then I used Spine 2D's path constraints to create joint chains similar to an ik spline chain setup in Maya. With four of these, the animator could position the inner two to make the skirt appear as one piece when the legs aren't crossed and use the outer two to deform the silhouette. Since path constraints are expensive, they are put in separate control rig skin that doesn't get exported. Animation is baked before export.
  Rig also setup with extra joints that will use additive animation to create new body types without conflicting with the movement or requiring extra art assets made.
• 00:18.5 Bounce script/tool. Uses the formula for a parabola to make an object bounce according to the bouncing ball animation principle. User can adjust bounce height, speed, wobble rotation, and wobble speed at runtime by pressing spacebar. Created to explore animation styles that use smaller spritesheets for mobile performance.
• 01:13.5 Ax/Pogo Stick rig. Features pivot switch, ribbon spring for evenly spaced stretching&compression of vertebrae, moveable details such as ax blades, spines, teeth, skull,etc. 
• 02:18.5 Horse skeleton rig. Joint placement based on correct thoroughbred anatomy. Features FK/IK switching for neck/tail, hind leg switching for bucking vs rearing, rib controls for breathing, automatic carpel split with foreleg IK, hind leg IK, 3 joint FK toe controls, knee controls, head and jaw controls
• 02:58 Convert to Additive Anim script. A script that takes an animation and removes the main pose from it. The extracted animation can then be put on an additive layer and reused on top of a different pose.