Just wondering if mgear has anything similiar. Would be a good feature. I think blender has something like this. I don’t know how Autodesk hasnt implemented such obvious features. Things that are suppose to be 2 clicks become tedious work arounds.
there is 2 components that have this kind of bendy arms and legs
also mGear have the rollSpline solver
This solver is a bezier curve that uses the scale of the control objects as a tangent
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Wow. thanks. the free tangent is exactly what I had in mind.
Maya certainly does have Bezier curves. And you can rig them up as a ribbon IK, etc.
I don’t mean a literal bezier curve but a joint setup that acts in this manner. I’m in no way a technical artist but everything in Maya’s rigging pipeline just seems like circumvention for common and obvious tasks.
I would be interested to see how that works.
It is not common and obvious. If it was, we would have a bunch of buttons like “Make Bendy Fish”. And it would be like color by number instead of painting with oils.
Instead we have simple, general components to assemble whatever we want. And that’s a good thing. Then you can begin to rig things no one thought of yet.
In Blender, there are bendy bones, but that doesn’t give you an instant fish. It’s a subdivided bone that can be used as a tool to rig different things.
Bezier ribbon IK:
- Draw a bezier curve. In this gif I made 4 points, and each point has bezier handles.
- Duplicate it and move it to the side. Now you have 2 curves.
- Loft those curves, and keep history.
- Add joints (yellow) to skin the curves. These are your controllers. Parent them in a hierarchy that makes sense for your rig.
- Add follicles with joints (red) along the lofted surface. These will skin your bendy fish.
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In the case of mGear, what is more common and obvious, and can be generalized into a list of modules is that most of us are here to rig bipeds and quadruped creatures. So we have limbs and spines and eyes and lips. But even the way those rigs work is based on years of conventions that animators and riggers built up, that has nothing to do with Maya, per se.
And not everyone agrees with those conventions, and they think rigs should work in different ways. If things become too obvious, then people stop experimenting with new ways of doing it.
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Hey Chris.
This topic is very interesting to me for a spinned-off concept. I myself am very rusty/amateurish in python. Given a nurbs surface, how would one elegantly batch place follicles and joints on it through a script?
Hey @mackerB, here is a blog post answer, with a Python script you can use.
I don’t use follicles anymore, because I found they started to flip and jitter in Maya 2018. I now use matrix constraints.
Or alternatively, you can use some of the tools in mGear, the way it places joints along a curve in the eyes and lips. You can see the way it does it in the code. Reading through the mGear code is a great way to brush up on your Python too.
In scripts/mgear/rigbits/facial_rigger/lips_rigger.py you can search for gear_curvecns_op to see the part where things are attached to the curves. (I believe.) To attach to a curve, you need a curve and an upvector. You can get a surface-like effect by using a 2nd curve and attach upvectors to that curve.
http://www.mgear-framework.com/mgear_dist/mgear/core/applyop.html
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