Sunday 12 April 2015

tb tools - match tangents for looping anims

When animating for video games you end up making a lot of looping actions, idles walks etc.
One thing that is very important is keeping track of your tangents at the start and end of your loop. Miss matched tangents can break the illusion of a nicely looping animation, highlighting the start and end. But it's a total pain maintaining each end of your curves, so...

I've revised the shortcut I use to match tangents either from the start to the end, or end to the start of your loop. It leaves the outside tangents alone as you may have other animations on your timeline. It takes your current playback range as your loop range. If you have a curve selected it will work on your selection, otherwise it will work on all curves on the objects in your selection.
I usually have this set to "ctrl + [" and "ctrl+]" ;)

I'll go into more depth about how I lay out my keyboard shortcuts to work faster in some other posts.

Get the file here:

https://github.com/tb-animator/tbtools/blob/master/python/matchTangents.py

usage as so:
import matchTangents as mt  
reload (mt)  
mt.match('start')  
#or 
mt.match('end')  


This will get added to a toolkit of useful shortcuts very soon! watch this space for more tools.

Friday 10 April 2015

swanky python editor - PyCharm

I was shown this neat editor for writing python code today, not that I really know python but whatever. Look it's grey, grey means new and modern in software land. Give it a try, it's free.

Get it here:

https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/

Friday 3 April 2015

adding extra buttons in maya

Baking all your animation down all the time? I'm not, but people I know are, true story. Recently I was asked why a bakedown script wasn't quite working properly, and it turned into making a new button in the anim layer tab in maya to merged all layers :p
Here's the code to just bake down your layers;
 animLayerMerge( `ls -type animLayer` )  
But... why not just add that into the main maya ui? It's easy!
oo shiny
oo shiny