Group items tagged

"character skinning made easy" ngSkinTools is a skinning plugin for Autodesk Maya, introducing new concepts to character skinning such as layers, any-pose-mirroring, enhanced paint brushes, true smoothing, and more. LAYERS Skinning layers are a central feature of ngSkinTools. With them, you break your rig down into easier manageable parts and edit them separately, then blend everything together through layer transparency. They're not just a simple way to make your work more organized - they also physically isolate groups of influences from the rest of the rig, so paint and edit operations won't mix-in influences you were not expecting. This also allows you do things that were impossible before: per-layer mirroring, adjusting influence weight up/down through layer transparency, blend transfered weights with previous weights, to name a few. MIRRORING You won't be needing to go to T-pose again when going through paint+mirror cycle, you can mirror in any pose now. There's also a much greater control over what influences mirror onto which one: associating left-right influences by name without prefix, manual association overrides, etc. Mirroring is also layer-friendly, so you can mirror just the parts of your model you're currently working on - very helpful, when you want to keep other parts of your rig intact. PAINTING ngSkinTools has it's own set of paint tools, which are capable of working on a per-layer basis. Each tool maintains it's own intensity, which is handy when toggling between smooth and replace through shift-modifier. Smooth is completely redesigned and you're going to just love it:) smoothing The new smooth brush gives much better results, as it operates on all influences of a vertex at once. For even greater control, the more precise "relax weights" tool is there, which also can smooth across mesh boundaries and thin meshes. COMPATIBILITY ngSkinTools operate on standard maya's skinCluster (also known as "smooth skin"), so no custom nodes will be req

"Welcome to our website. We, a couple of Tech-Artists (and geeks) decided to come up with our vision about having a platform where we can put out our ideas and discuss with everyone as well. We are fans of open-source, learning so much from the community and we would like to give something back. The reason creaturerigs.com was created. We are CharacterTDs mainly working with Autodesk Maya among other softwares. Check out our Tools and Rigs available in the Download section of our website. Go Ahead, check it out, have interesting fun with it and we would love to have your feedback on anything and everything. In the Coming weeks, we will continue to share more ideas, break down Animation Rigs with traditional setups, showcase our own setups and develop/maintain Auto-Rigging tools as well."

David Coleman - Creating QT interfaces for Maya and MotionBuilder This Masterclass will demonstrate the workflow of creating interfaces in QT Designer, and connecting them to functions within Maya and MotionBuilder. The basics of QT Designer will be covered, along with connecting sliders to drive facial blendshapes using the same interface for both Maya and MotionBuilder. Some techniques for procedurally creating QT widgets using PyQt will also be demonstrated.

wild collection of Maya API related links from a user on linkedin.com. some might be useful.

here all links again with a new line char inserted between each link... http://ncca.bmth.ac.uk/gallery/list_by/tag/maya http://www.simplymaya.com/download_pages/ http://www.davidlanier3d.com/Maya-plugins-MEL.htm http://www.oroboro.com/rafael/docserv.php/index/maya/article/maya http://www.gamedev.net/reference/programming/features/mayaexporter/ http://www.highend3d.com/maya/tutorials/development_api/ http://mayadqskinning.sourceforge.net/ http://www.comet-cartoons.com/3ddocs/mayaAPI/ http://modthemachine.typepad.com/ http://developer.nvidia.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=1600 http://thebuildingcoder.typepad.com/ http://www.andynicholas.com/?cat=27 http://www.tek2shoot.com/products/software-plugins/softimage-xsi/unexposed-mental-ray-shaders-v11-32-64bits/ http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems/gpugems_ch16.html http://blog.gamedeff.com/?p=78 http://www.blitzcode.net/3d_1.shtml#Lightmap_Compiler http://www.unifycommunity.com/wiki/index.php?title=SkinShader http://knol.google.com/k/koen-samyn/hlsl-per-vertex-lighting-shader/2lijysgth48w1/7#done http://www.alan-warren.com/tag/shader/ http://www.coniserver.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page http://www.headus.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=394 http://tamarind.free.fr/noctua/index.php/2010/03/23/a-simple-dependency-graph-library/#more-103 http://www.jb101.co.uk/2008/05/05/fixing-help-in-maya-2008/ http://blogs.msdn.com/b/gpalem/archive/2008/08/20/how-to-find-the-shading-groups-for-the-given-shape-node-in-maya-api.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/gpalem/ http://ludovic.chabant.com/devblog/ http://www.gogototo.com/a-post-about-maya-api-enviroment-setup.html http://dev.mokastudio.tv/taxonomy/term/4/0 http://efreedom.com/Question/1-2097306/Creating-Simple-Hierarchy-Structure-Maya-Using-Mel-Python http://coding4fun.org/?p=99 http://sayinghai.com/blog/?cat=14 http://graphics.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~drake/data/articles/ http://www.autodesk.com/us/maya/docs/Maya85/DeveloperResources/Introduction_to_Maya_Python_API.html http://www.scribd.com/login htt