TOOLS / R&D

The eyelids module was done with PARTES, and It analyzes the geometry to find the center, and corner and eyelids placement.

PARTES

This tool started as a modular auto-rig system, but never fully replaced aRig.
At the moment PARTES is is a collection of powerful modules that improve my rigging and tool workflow.

Some of this modules are:

Joints, Transforms. Controls, Guides, Curves, Polygons, Blendshapes, SkinClusters, Custom Primitives, Follicles, Ribbons, Shaders, Locators, Aim Rigs, IK FK Rigs, nHair, Maya Wrappers and Utilities.

PARTES old UI to manage template assets, it is capable to iterate back and forth between the setup and animation rigs in the same maya file. — **PARTES** old UI to manage template assets, it is capable to iterate back and forth between the setup and animation rigs in the same maya file.

The ribbons module in PARTES can be applied to any surface, it has roll and slide attributes.

Rigging Toolkit

A dockable window for Maya that can contain any script or tool.
All the buttons and contextual menus are built from a JSON dictionary that can be personalized.

Example:

{   
    "label": "Transfer Skin",
    "group": "Geometry",
    "module": "transferSkin",
    "command": "main()",
    "tooltip": "It transfers the skin weights",
    "color": [[0.3, 0.25, 0.26]]
}

All the scripts are loaded from a common directory and it can load modules in both MEL and PYTHON.

aRig

A non-modular auto-rig system, it runs sequentially in 3 stages, PLACE, BUILD and CONNECT.
This was the first auto-rig system I built and it has been evolving overtime. Even without being modular out of the box, I created multiple variations to accommodate different types of projects, (Quadruped, Birds etc).
Also, it’s possible to run other procedural modules on top of this to customize it and extend its capabilities.

This tool keeps changing, but the most recent features, are the new placement rig and the ability to save the skeleton and controls as a JSON file. This allows for quicker and non destructive iterations.

Export/Import Data

I built a collection of tools to save and load data from the rigs like skin weights, joint placement and blend shapes.
Sometimes I would have to edit or rebuild rigs that aren’t done entirely by me, also upgrade rigs from older Maya versions. And these tools allow me to reuse most of the data generated from the rigs.

BLENDSHAPES

This tool is particularly interesting because it will export not only the blendshape targets, but It will also read any SDK and expressions and save that data too.
You can later on rebuild that section of the rig or edit the OBJ geometry generated by the tool.

SKIN WEIGHTS

It will save a JSON file with all the skin data, you can later apply that data to the selected vertices or the whole mesh.

SKELETON

It will save a JSON file with the skeleton placement. All custom attributes, and hierarchy is saved as part of the data too.