Tools
I haven't done a good enough job of finding time (and getting permission) to capture all of the amazing work in tools and automation the Technical Art team at Iron Galaxy and myself have done over the past several years. The video above is just one of the many tools in our toolkit, a modular rigging system written in Python for Maya 2016 and above.
I feel particularly proud of it because I developed the vast majority of it on my own, and I learned a lot in the process. I drew a lot of inspiration from 3D Buzz's tutorial series "Developing Modular Rigging Systems with Python" but changed the approach at its core to adjust to the studios rigging and animation pipeline, implemented the UI through PyQt and added more features than I can remember. Full control over the orientation of every joint and control the tool generates was a primary concern for me, as well as supporting both Y-up and Z-up creation modes (default joint orientation behaves just like Maya when you switch between the two). It was a non-trivial amount of work that I originally underestimated, but it has proven to be time well spent given all the projects that have benefited from those features at the studio so far.
Until I create more videos to populate this page, I'll leave here a snippet of the tool in action, which includes a brief glance of some other tools we have developed at Iron Galaxy.
I feel particularly proud of it because I developed the vast majority of it on my own, and I learned a lot in the process. I drew a lot of inspiration from 3D Buzz's tutorial series "Developing Modular Rigging Systems with Python" but changed the approach at its core to adjust to the studios rigging and animation pipeline, implemented the UI through PyQt and added more features than I can remember. Full control over the orientation of every joint and control the tool generates was a primary concern for me, as well as supporting both Y-up and Z-up creation modes (default joint orientation behaves just like Maya when you switch between the two). It was a non-trivial amount of work that I originally underestimated, but it has proven to be time well spent given all the projects that have benefited from those features at the studio so far.
Until I create more videos to populate this page, I'll leave here a snippet of the tool in action, which includes a brief glance of some other tools we have developed at Iron Galaxy.
Additional feature and visual development for the Animation Interface and Template Builder by Hunter Hart.