> ls category
   "python"
  • Guppy Animation Tools is getting an update!

    Hello everyone! Or should I say, hello anyone? Is anyone out there? I have more I want to say about my math-ridden adventures in VR, but I need to interrupt my irregularly scheduled blogging broadcast to bring you urgent news! I have some time set aside to exclusively update Guppy Animation Tools. I expect this next release will have many breaking changes, so I’ve just released the last maintenance update to Guppy Animation Tools.

    For this update I want to:

    • Rewrite all GUI’s into QT (expect small tweaks to the UI’s nothing earth shattering).
    • Remove features that are either replicated by Maya or don’t seem to be used by many people.
    • Rewrite any code that makes me squint and question my own intelligence. (Guppy Animation Tools was written as I learned python. And it shows in some areas.)

    What does this mean to you, my dear intrepid reader? It means, if you use a feature and want it to stay, have noticed a bug and want it fixed, or want a new feature, NOW is the time to tell me! For everyone else, as you were!

  • Demo Reel Updated!

    I’ve finally updated my demo reel! It has my new smooth stretch algorithm front and center. If you didn’t quite understand some of the concepts of my previous posts, you should definitely look at the video. I think it makes the concept if not the math a lot easier to understand.

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  • My Magical Mathematical Journey Part 3

    Excellent. Smooth stretch was solved. Another day, another math problem solved. I felt like a crime fighter who just beat this giant math monster back. Or was the math monster really solved? Wait, wait wait. Hold on a minute here! The whole reason of redoing this thing was that smooth stretch 2.0 didn’t work well in an IK/FK switch! If this new formula can’t help me solve that, then it’s no better than the old one. Oh crap!

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  • My Magical Mathematical Journey Part 2

    As I was trying to say in my last post, two weeks ago I began my mathematical journey into smooth stretch. This time around I knew what I wanted to accomplish. I wanted a way to represent smooth stretch using just math. My Maya API chops had increased since my last attempt, so I could now wrap this math into a nice python/c++ node.

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  • Guppy Animation Tools Released!

    The particularly astute imaginary visitor will notice that I’ve uploaded Guppy Animation Tools to Github. This is the first repository I’ve put on Github related to Maya. It is a collection of animation scripts and plugins I’ve written in the past eight months or so.

    In keeping with my original goal of getting my work to the masses, this collection includes both finished and unfinished works. Clever Keys, one of my most polished scripts, is in this repository. It is a much more recent version of Clever Keys than is on my website or creative crash, with several new bug fixes. Guppy Animation Tools also includes my newest and most untested animation script, Lock ‘n Hide. Lock ‘n Hide lets animators lock and or hide attributes on referenced nodes. Those are two of the six tools in this repository, so if you’re an animator in search of some fun tools go check it out! If you find a bug please report it!

  • My favorite typo.

    My favorite typo when I’m writing python code is “enumerage.” I make this mistake about 25% of the time I try to type “enumerate” for some reason. And every time I have to giggle a little. Something about the idea of Number Rage tickles the little kid in me (or perhaps more etymologically correct, Counting Rage). I imagine a person getting angrier and angrier from the mere sight of numbers. Numbers anywhere. They can’t stand the numbers. Especially when the numbers are in order.

    Do you have a favorite typo?

  • Fun Trick #1

    Here’s a fun trick in Maya. This creates a locator with no name:

    import maya.cmds as cmd
    cmd.spaceLocator(n = '1')
    

    It seems like I always manage to accidentally do this in every 3D package I try.

  • My Oodles of Unemployment

    Hello World!

    I have been happily unemployed for some time now. Happily? Yes! As long as it doesn’t last forever, I’m quite happy getting a chance to work on some of my own projects. R&R for the weary working programmer at heart. And now I think it’s about time I shared some of what I’ve been doing with my oodles of spare time.

    I started with tool making and later progressed to more tool making. I love making tools. I really do. I think I would be equally if not more happy working at a job making tools than rigging. In fact, I’m considering pursuing a job making tools over rigging. If that doesn’t pan out, then I’ll start transitioning from using my spare time making tools to rigging. And making rigging tools.

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  • My First API Deformer

    So much has been happening, where to start? How about Maya’s API. So I decided to learn how to swim, and jumped into the deep end of Maya’s API last month. It was the deep end, because I decided to start with writing a deformer in Python. I thought that python would be the simpler language to do it in before trying C++, since the last time I touched C++ was more than a few years ago. Boy was I wrong.

    So lets imagine this situation. There is a company out there that does the best work in their field. And that’s the company you want, since they’re the best. They are of course located in Japan, the mecha center of this industry. So you hire their most flexible agent. He shows up at your door, and the first words he says are, “Hello, me the name associated with subject Super Agent Man is.” Huh? The most flexible agent from the best company in the world speaks English with a Japanese grammatical structure? How does that make any sense? Well, it doesn’t. But that’s Maya’s Python API. You can write it in Python, but you’re still speaking C++.

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