Friday, July 29, 2005

MaxScripted Character Rig

I'm taking a break from shaders for awhile to jump headlong into something else - MaxScritpt! I've started work on a new script that will allow me to build all of the bones and rigging for a character with one click. It's been a little bit of a challenge for me to get started doing this since I have to look up almost every thing that I want to do - but it will be worth it.

The cool thing is that I can put a lot of effort into this script upfront so that it creates a really nice rig. Then all my future characrters can have a very nice rig. In the past I've only had time to build nice rigs for the main characters in the game and the others had to have simple ones mainly because of the demands of the schedule. With a scripted rig, all the character rigs can be very very good - because they all come from the same script. I can use my time to refine the script, customize each rig a bit, and make the skinning better instead of doing the tedious work of laying out bones, creating controllers, wiring things together, etc. The script will take care of all of that for me. I'm excited about it.

So far I've got a script that creates the legs of the character. I'll post updates here when I make more progress.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Have you seen Michael Comet's charRigger, or Kees Rijnen's PuppetShop, or Andre Hotz' (of SkinOrDie) character system. Can't recall the name of Andre's, but I have it saved local if you want a look.

I think you probably want to roll your own, for learning's sake, but it can't hurt to get ideas from others' attempts.

Good luck man, sounds like fun!

August 24, 2005 3:18 PM  
Blogger Ben Cloward said...

Thanks Eric! I've been using Mike Commet's script a lot for learning. It has a lot of functions that I'm using and I really like the way it's put together. It has helped me get my script up and running much quicker than if I had started from scratch.

August 25, 2005 7:46 AM  

Post a Comment

<< Home