This is the last weekly assignment for my scripting in Maya class! This week we needed to create a script to rig part of an arm. I may have stretched this definition a tad but I thought it was the best decision for me because I planned to do somewhat of an unconventional rig for my final project and thought this week could be used to get a head start on figuring that out. Nonetheless, I think this is still applicable for use on an arm if you had a character with bendy bones.
I used what I learned last week about created the solution manually first before attempting to script it. It paid off because this did not cause nearly as much of a headache as my stretchy joints script did.
Essentially this rig takes three CVs that define a curve and creates cluster deformers for them. It then creates three joints. Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out how to move the joints to the CVs or the cluster handles since neither of them have world space translation attributes. While I’m sure there’s a way to automate this part I couldn’t figure it out for this week. After moving the joints to the clusters, the second part of the script parents the joints to the clusters, extrudes geometry along the curve, and creates an IK handle. The result is a bendy curved geometry that could be easily animated!
To further expand upon this script I would look into painting weights as well as fixing the issue I described in the video where the first edgeloop of the geometry doesn’t follow the orientation of the rig.
portfolio