21 February 2020

Blendy Curve Fun!

Wow, it really has been an age since I last posted anything here but I think it is time to breathe life back into the old blog!

It;s been a busy.... erm... half decade since I last wrote anything here, I'm still plugging away with Maya though, making things move, look pretty and scripting little tools to help me with my work which is why I'm making this post.



A while back I made a tool  (see video above) to assist with a workflow that I wanted to employ in a short film but life and things got in the way of production and the tool got forgotten and sat gathering dust in the bowels of my google drive until recently when I had another idea of how I might be able to use it, below is a proof of concept for that idea....



It seems that a lot of my ideas make it as far as proving a concept and then they grind to a halt..... it might be the academic in me only requiring the sweet fix of new knowledge or it might simply be that to progress beyond proving concept usually requires time and money - two resources that are in short supply in my world!

So, as I don't appear to be able to produce anything to completion I figured that I would release the script into the wild to see what super awesome stuffs you might be able to make with it. Here's a video to give anyone interested a very rough explanation of the tool and how to use it.


And here's a linkety-link to download  zip file containing the script and bonus shelf icon....

CLICK TO DOWNLOAD CURVE BLEND TOOL

Note: PFX will only follow the animated curves when the animation mode is set to DG (Preferences > Animation > Evaluation > DG)

Feedback is always welcome and, if you do download the tool, I'd love to see how you have used it so please share :)

Cheers,

Mat  :)