I posted this over on our companion web site for the book, but figured it couldn’t hurt to cross post here for anyone who doesn’t regularly visit the book site. Seth, Kristine, and I will all be doing poster sessions related to Maya/Python stuff. If you happen to make it out to GDC please stop by and say hi!
Archive for the ‘General Interest’ Category
GDC
Wednesday, January 11th, 2012Book!
Monday, October 10th, 2011In keeping with my lack of information about when our book will be available, it turns out Amazon has actually had the Kindle version available for about a week, and the hardcover will be available in a couple of days! Thanks to a diligent reader, Nicholas Breslow, I was made aware of this fact today, so I’ve opened up the book’s companion web site today as well.
Thanks in advance for anyone who checks it out, and do please contact me with any errors you find so I can note them (as well as any second opinions). It was quite the affair to get it wrapped up, and I’m sure plenty of things slipped through the cracks.
Biped Editor Update
Monday, August 15th, 2011I’ve been pretty silent lately, but I’ve also been busy! In addition to getting our place ready for our first baby (!), I’ve been wrapping up stuff on the Maya Python book. I’m happy to report the proofs have been well under way, and it will be going to print soon. Our official sale date is at the end of November. I hope some of you out there find it helpful!
With baby due any day, I am frantically trying to tie up a few loose ends, and so made time to put together an update for my Biped Editor on the Unity Asset Store. The main new feature I added is some simple mechanisms to help characters intelligently get up from ragdoll (a request I’ve gotten from quite a few customers). I haven’t had a huge number of test cases, so do please let me know if you have any issues so I can get it fixed! (Note also I will be increasing the tool’s price, so buy it now while it’s cheap and get the free upgrade as soon as it hits!)
An Automated Pipeline for Generating Run-Time Rigs
Friday, April 1st, 2011On account of getting the flu at GDC, and then having to catch up on all of my work that wasn’t getting done, I’ve been a little behind, but I wanted to make sure I got up a write-up for my main conference presentation from GDC this year.
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AM Tools 1.05 and Unity Maya Extensions!
Monday, March 28th, 2011Although I still need to do a formal write-up for my GDC presentation, I do finally have all of the source code ready to go (or at least I think it’s ready enough), so I wanted to make it available for download now. Here’s a brief summary of changes:
- All of my Python stuff is officially copyrighted under the MIT License now.
- Since I know a fair number of people out there rely on decent API examples for learning, I refactored all of my plug-ins to conform to better practice.
- As part of the plug-in refactoring process, the AM_HipConstraintCmd and AM_ShoulderConstraintCmd plug-ins are now deprecated, and the commands are contained in the same plug-in files as the nodes.
- Math has been dramatically simplified in both the amHipConstraint node and amShoulderConstraint node. In the case of the latter, the results you get should be identical to before, while the former will yield some minor different results when out of the lateral plane of rotation.
- All of my comments have been reformatted so that Doxygen can generate more useful information for the online documentation.
- All tool help menus now link to the online documentation to bypass text formatting issues with maya.cmds GUI in Qt.
- Added files module with utilities for batch conversion of files to FBX, or for downgrading Maya ASCII files. (Note it is pretty hacky and not tested especially thoroughly, but I included it in case anyone might find it helpful.)
- Added unity sub-package with utilities for modifying files to work in conjunction with my Unity Maya Extensions.
