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.