Unity is a very user-friendly game engine. Previously I had only imported rigs and animation into it for game projects while I was at SCAD. The past week I put aside some time to really get a sense of what can be done with it. I had never worked with C# before but it's a surprisingly easy language to work with (though a year and half of C++ experience is a big reason for that). Here's a little AI test I did where you place "coins" with the your mouse and if they are within th

Space switching are pretty common in rigging, and often they can be used to simulate gravity. If you have a hair control match the orientation of the master control even when the head controls moves and rotates, then it will look like it's being affected by gravity, and it's easy to animate some extra follow through because you don't need to counter-animate when you rotate the head. But most of the rigs that I have seen use this technique have a major issue. When you twist th

So recently I created a proof of concept of a leg component where the deformation hierarchy and the animation hierarchy were separated out. I relied on assembling orientation matrices using vectors, using matrix constraints and vectorProducts instead of default constraints. I recorded a rambling video about it since I don't have time for a massive write up and to be honest the ideas in this proof-of-concept aren't wholly original, I've just combined them in a cool way. So ins

So I've talked about making this deformer since 2016 (you can still see my terribly proof-of-concept using expressions on this blog). But it wasn't until the beginning of 2019 that I started learning the Maya API. I had a python version working at the end of 2019 but I never actually ended up posting that proof-of-concept video (probably because I was too lazy to record it). That python deformer had a lot of problems that I talk about in this video. This isn't the final post