Sunday, September 11, 2005

PEN Attribute Holder

I've added the functionality of the PEN Attribute Holder into my character rigging script. PEN Attribute Holder is a cool modifier written by Paul Neale that allows you to save the values of a set of custom attributes as presets and then recall them at any time. It also allows you to save and load presets. This means that I can create hand and finger poses, save them as presets, and recall them at any time during the animation process. I'm hoping that this will speed up the animation on characters' hands and with the time we save we can make the characters' hand movements and poses more expresive. Paul's modifier also has other useful tools for working with sets of custom attributes.

I want to post a special thank you here to the people that have helped and contributed to my character rigging script. First of all, a big thanks to Mike Comet who's incredible rigging script I have used as a framework on which to build my own. I also want to thank Alan Noon for encouraging me to jump in and learn MaxScript. Of course I want to thank Paul Neale for his really cool attribute holder script and all of the other great stuff he has poste
d on his site. And finally a big thanks to Mark Tsang, Sebastian Schoellhammer, Scott Goffman, Kees Rijnen, and Larry Minton on the various message boards for their help with MaxScript syntax and other bumps-in-the-road that I've run into. People like these who are willing to help out the new guy (me) are just fantastic. Thanks a lot guys!

I've got more features planned for the script so stay tuned! Also, those of you that come here to read about normal mapping and HLSL shaders, I haven't forgetten or abandoned that stuff. In fact, I've been iching to write a new shader or two .... :0)