Extra ShapeOrig mesh node madness

I have been dealing with this phantom shapes for a while. Searched through internet, asked people and only found what everybody knows: they are shapes which saves original mesh.

There can be only one

Applying deformer over deformer, sometimes causes duplicated shapeOrig nodes. It's not a vital problem but extra data on the scene can cause innecesary bigger files.
Deleting history is not the solution. You can use File>Optimize scene to delete those nodes, but I wanted to know the truth about this extra nodes.

After examining for a while those nodes I found the obvious solution: if you have (for example) 2 shapeOrig on a mesh object, only one is the correct node, other one is simply rubbish. How to detect which one to delete? Simply as hell, the good one has an output connection, the other is simply watching time passing by with no connection.

Output connections, that's the real shapeOrig that is being used by deformers

No connections, safe to delete.

Just delete those extra shapeOrig without fear manually or just a simply auto script to found those shapeorig without connections.

That's it. Hope it helps.

New life, new places

Finally I came to Sophia, Bulgaria.
I had my doubts about the city, but only one night was needed to really see the beauty of its city center.

Ivan Vazov's Theater

I just met a few coworkers of my new job here at Worldwide FX and with some really big pints in our hands  they show me a few really nice places (by night of course)
But yes, language for now is extremely complicated, let's try next week...

Cartoon facial rig

Hey everybody! I just uploaded a WIP of my character cartoon; model and rig by me, concept by ESDIP school of arts.

I continue updating this rig with improvements, but actually is 100% working.
Here we goes:

Or Vimeo link:
https://vimeo.com/70043481

Hope you like it and comments are welcome!

Maya automatic tail

Well, It's about time. I began working on several systems for maya.

Tail!

Time ago I saw a really amazing system prepared on maya to automate tails. It's really awesome how you can quick prepare this onto maya and blend this one to from FK to automatic. Now, I did it by myself.
Just some nCloth simulation and there it goes!

And there's a sample video about that:

I will continue preparing systems in maya so pray for me!

Visualization and naming tools - Part 1

First of all, this is a non finished package of tools but a work in progress.

Creating a rig is not just aligning bones and planting constraints. Is more about initial decisions and a "how to" methodology.
In this first part, I will show you the Channel Inspector tool. I designed this one as a need of control of my channels (Pos rot and scale) in both frozen and Zero.

Do not let that scale explode!

As you see in the next video, there's an "update" button. This is just to avoid the tool reading every transformation in the scene at every moment. There are a couple of "freeze transform" buttons. First one simply freeze transformations of every selected object and the second one is just to freeze transform only the not previously freezed objects. Finally Tranform to zero simply resets transforms to their original values (zero)

Just to comment, freeze transform i'm using is not the same as in 3Ds Max by default. Homemade!

Skin Bone Cleaner tool

Just retaking the blog!

For this post, I want to show my latest tool; Skin Bone Cleaner. This tool is intended for gaming rigs. As many of you may know, in many video game engines, there is a limit of bones per vertex, so skinning can be tedious.

Easy UI (no more needed)

First just skin the object without worrying about the number of bones per vertex. Then select the object (previously skinned) and indicating the maximum number of bones per vertex at the spinner, the tool will do the rest.

Before using the tool.

For example, if we have 7 bones to a vertex, and our maximum is three, the tool will calculate the bone with less influence in this vertex and remove it from the list dividing your weight in other bones.

One click later!

Simple and effective.

Finally is here. Demo reel 2012 from Tadeo Jones movie.

And in awesome HD :P

Vimeo too: Pedro Domingo's Demo reel 2012