Driving a channel with a differently named channel and storing for the build

[GerardVOK]

Hello. I have been using mGear for a week and I am very impressed with it. Well done Miquel and dev team!

Apologies if there is an obvious answer for this one but I want to do a few small tweaks to (example) the foot setup and drive the foot_L0_roll_ctl.rx with a new attribute, say: leg_L0_ik_ctl.footRoll (in order to hide the roll control). Presumably this can be done with a post script but is there any other built in way to do this in mGear? Channel Wrangler doesnt seem to manage attributes of two different names driving each other.

Thanks for any advice.

[Jerome]

Hello @GerardVOK

You can choose not to create the Rool control is you want ont the Foot Root settings. Otherwise any custom behavior you want needs to be done with custom steps / scripts.

Hope this helps
JD

[GerardVOK]

Hello Jerome. Thanks very much for the super fast reply. No worries. I just had a play with the pre/post scripts and they will be fine to use for the purpose. In fact it was super easy to import my own python modules via these in order to use the functions I already have. GREAT stuff!!

On more mGear centric note: Is there a convenience function to find specific parts of a rig based on the guide types that were used to create them? In other words could I find all of the legs of a rig based on a ‘type’ (eg leg_L0_ik_ctl) by querying all guide component types and names? I’ll scan the docs for this but thought some one might know. I can always scan all the guides to find the required “Comp Type” and “Comp name” and then create the strings of the resulting rig parts from that and ‘ls’ these, but it sounds messy. Thought there may be a class/function that would give the rig node name(s) from the guide.

Cheers.
Gerard

[GerardVOK]

actually I had a go at turning off the roll control… I do want the functionality of the roll just not driven by another controller. I figure I only need to add the roll to the leg_L0_ik_ctl and I can hide the additional control to keep things a little bit more simple. Post script works for this. +1

[chrislesage]

This post might help for finding things by type:

How to use the stepDict to access ALL the things

Hey everyone, @Justin_Pedersen and Jascha from Triggerfish helped me figure out how to use the stepDict. I only really knew how to get the model with oModel = stepDict['mgearRun'].model But they helped me figure out how to crack open the whole dictionary of components! So we’ve been digging around, and this is what we’ve found so far. There is a ton of information you can access in your build scripts. I’ve always just been calling objects by name in PyMEL. But this is potentially much more re…

I’m actually not sure if you can access all that stuff outside of the rig build. But note that all the roots of the components have attributes with metadata stored on them. You can also find it there.

For example, if I look at my “leg_L0_ik_ctl”, the root above it has an attribute .componentType:
leg_L0_root.componentType = leg_2jnt_freeTangents_01
Which is the type of leg guide I use in my rigs.

[GerardVOK]

Thanks Chris. Both suggestions are very helpful. I was able to quite easily search and parse what I needed.
Cheers. I’ll acquaint myself with the stepDict further.