Sunday 29 March 2015

smooth scrubbing in maya

Here's a demo of a tool to see your animation in a silky smooth way. It's an expansion of the normal time dragger tool, which scrubs your animation but snapped to frames. This one will disable the snapping when active, meaning you can see the animation in between integer frames.




The tool is in python so stick it in a maya python folder. For the maya hotkeys you will need to set 2 commands, one for when your key is pressed, and one for when you release the key. This has to be the same combination of keys for the pressed and release, just like the default maya version. If not then you wont get your previous tool set back automagically and the timeline snapping will stay off.

on press
 import timeDragger as td  
 reload(td)  
 td.drag(True)  
on release
 import timeDragger as td  
 reload(td)  
 td.drag(False)  

get the python file here;
Download timeDrag script
Script updated to be less dumb! thanks, https://github.com/Regnareb 

optionVar and global variables in mel

Option variables are a way of storing data in maya between sessions. Most of your preferences are saved in this way. Global variables are a way of making information available between scripts on a per session basis. Say you wanted to know how many times a function had run, but keep the total between sessions. You could store that number as an optionVar. That way the total would persist between maya sessions.


Sunday 22 March 2015

First post, old showreel...

Hey hey, for lack of a better thing to put as the first post, here's my old showreel!