So this is my attempt to recreate the effects of a tool made by Judd Simantov at Naughty Dog. It is a simply distance based muscle simulation. How it works There are two pairs of locators. They drive the CV position of two linear curves. The are lofted to create a nurbs surface (I do this with a node but don't actually have a shape node). The point on the surface (that matches the position of the midpoints of the two curves) has it's position and normal vector queried by a po

So in this tutorial I show off how to use matrices to make motion paths and rivets and follicles work in local space rather than worldspace by using some matrix math. If you aren't familiar with matrices this post has a list of resources: https://www.jonah-reinhart.com/single-post/2018/02/14/Up-Vector-Trick-Part-2-Maya-Matrices

Just a quick (but in my opinion visually impressive) update to the rolling ball, contact with a ground plane. The ground contact is actually achieved fairly easily. instead of using the position of the control to drive the position of the ball directly, we put it through a node network. We find the closest point on surface to the controls position We get the normal vector at that point. We add the normal vector to the position (we would need to scale the normal if the ball ha

So here it is! A procedurally animated ball. As before the only keyframe animation is translations. The techniques I used are pretty much the same as the ones in the Disney Paper but they still need to be encapsulated into a nice package before they could really be applied in a useful way. In Part 3 I plan to implement ground plane contact using a nurbs surface and matrices. and maybe set the system up to be more nicely contained in one tranform node. Seems like a lot of stuf

So now that I've worked with Matrices and Vectors quite a bit I'm going to tackle something I read about when I first started rigging. Rhino's procedurally animated hamster ball from Disney's Bolt. They talk about how it was made in the paper entitled "Rhino-Palooza: Procedural Animation and Mesh Smoothing". But rather than jumping right into it and trying a ball I wanted to start with something easier and automate a wheel. Hopefully some techniques that I used in this rig w