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Do Mgear rigs work without Mgear installed?

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#1

I am currently working at a place that has no modular rigging in place yet and doing everything by hand is crazy in my eyes, but there would be no way to install mgear across the many locations this place does business. My question is after the rig is built, does the rig work without the plugin installed?

Advanced Skelleton works fine after the rig is created, but it does not use any custom nodes.

Thanks!

Greg Punchatz

1 Like
#2

Hi @punchatz

Currently you need the solvers load in order to use mgear rigs.

Is possible to create new components without using the custom solvers. But right now all the components that ship with mgear use one or more custom nodes that require the mgear_solvers.mll

Here is an example of 2 components that doesn’t need mgear solvers https://gist.github.com/miquelcampos
but are not maintain and probably need to be updated for the latest mgear

I hope this helps.

Cheers,
Miquel

2 Likes
#3

Hi Miguel,
I second that.
It would be great if mGear rigs would be “exportable” in a way it only uses Maya nodes so the client/colleague who receives it would not require to install the plugin to get it working.
Thanks,
Hossein

#4

Hi Hossein, so are you volunteering to make those solver-free components? :wink:

#5

Hi @Hossein @chrislesage,

Sorry for the radio silence this days, the work at the studio is keeping me really busy. I hope to be back on track with mGear dev in 1.5~2 months

Regarding the no custom solvers components (vanilla components) I have been thinking lately about this subject and decided that I will do it. More and more people is requesting it, and I also need it from time to time. so I will add this at the top of my “to do” list

cheers,
Miquel

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mGear rig work without mGear installed?
#6

That is surprising and great! And yeah it makes sense. I just watched the Spiderverse review video where a good percentage of the video was dedicated to installing mGear. I guess it would really help mGear spread and adoption, especially for animators and students.

#7

Maybe drag’n’drop installer would be a good idea? Just to place required solvers/scripts in place?

#8

Not sure how big an undertaking this is but thanks for considering it, would be fantastic to send rigs to animators without having to worry about installing mgear as well, and for render farm stuff.

#9

Would this in any way allow the mGear rig to be used outside of Maya, or just within Maya but without needing solvers installed?

#10

Yes, Maya is needed to open mGear rigs.

#11

hey! I have created a little drag&drop script that will install/copy mgear into Maya and allow people to quickly animate wiht the mgear rigs.

I tested out with Maya 2018 and after dragging the script in i could load a mgear rig successfully. Hope is working fine and helpful.

Cheers.

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mGear rig work without mGear installed?
#12

Thanks for this @Milio this is really great help for all the animators!

1 Like
#13

@Miquel I haven’t had a deep look at all the mGear solvers, so taken with a pinch of salt. Instead of re-writing all the components to fit a “Vanilla workflow”, what If there was a process that could be run post build that would find all the custom node types and from that replace them using default nodes.

This way you could “Convert” a rig to Vanilla nodes at the cost of rig run-time and speed but the benefit of being able to use it without any additional installations.

#14

That is possible for some nodes like matrix multiplication. But Maya dont have replacement for the complex nodes like IKFK2 bones or rollspline

Also will be a speed penalty with vanilla nodes. At less if you try to copy all the functions from the custom solvers. Provably the vanilla version will miss some of the functions or change some staff

#15

Thanks for considering this!

#16

Hi @chrislesage, Hi @Miquel
My apologies for super late reply. I would love to contribute to the development. My programming skills are limited. However, I’ve been doing mocap, facial rigging, photogrammetry and anything related to digital human for a long time. You can track my PhD project progression here: hosseinnajafi.com/stella
Also by any chance if you are coming to Siggraph Asia, I will be presenting there as well:
http://sa2019.conference-program.com/presentation/?id=doc_112&sess=sess329
What I could be efficient in development progression is a FACS based facial auto-rig. If that’s something on the roadmap, I would be more than happy to help out.
Best wishes,
Hossein

3 Likes
#17

Thanks @Hossein for the help offer!! yep I am interested on FACS. I will send you a PM in the next few days to continue de conversation :slight_smile:

Thanks,
Miquel

#18

Today I needed to convert the eye rig to the default MayĐ° nodes.
It was not difficult for the eyes rig.
I’ll leave the script here, maybe it will come in handy for someone.

# eyes mGear convert nodes
# convert "mgear_curveCns" nodes to default nurbs curves
import pymel.core as pm

for mg_cCns in pm.ls(type='mgear_curveCns'):
	crve = ''
	for src_a, crv_a in pm.listConnections( mg_cCns+'.outputGeometry', p=True, c=True ):
		print 'Trg:', crv_a
		print 'Src:', src_a
		crve = pm.duplicate(crv_a.node())[0]
		crve.worldSpace[0] >> crv_a
		crv_a.node().getParent().inheritsTransform.set(0)
	for i, trg_src in enumerate(pm.listConnections( mg_cCns+'.inputs', d=False, p=True, c=True ) ):
		trg_a, src_a = trg_src
		print 'i:', i
		print 'Trg:', trg_a
		print 'Src:', src_a
		DCm = pm.createNode('decomposeMatrix', name=src_a.nodeName()+'DCm')
		src_a >> DCm.inputMatrix
		DCm.outputTranslate >> crve.controlPoints[i]
	pm.delete(mg_cCns)
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