Often in game development, you will want to build many different characters that all share the same skeleton and controls. In order to guarantee that the characters are compatible, it would be very nice if guides could reference other guides. That way, if a common change needs to happen across many rigs, the rigger can just update 1 guide file and regenerate all the other rigs knowing that they will get the same exact change. Most of this can be achieved if rigs are able to be built off of referenced guide files, but it would be nice if the references could also exist just as SGT data. That said, just supporting referenced guides files would get us pretty far for this request.
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Would love to revive this thread to hear how other people solve this.
Recently tried a setup that seems to work.
- In one scene we create the base guide that should be universal for all the other rigs.
- We then save it out as a .ma and reference it in the new scene/character scene with a namespace.
- In the new scene with the referenced guides we add the extra components specific to that character.
- We then duplicate the referenced guides using
cmds.duplicate(upstreamNodes=True, smartTransform=True) - Select the duplicated guides and click
Build From Selection(the duplicated guides group should be delete after completing this step)
We also added logic so that we can look for the “controllers_org” group with a namespace when trying to extract controls.
So far it seems to work just fine, but it’s still early so unsure if there are any caveats using this method.
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