Sunday, March 31, 2013

Control Rig Connecter Script for Maya

First of all I really don't know how I should name this script...

What it does? well... It allows you to create, save and load a CSV table of your bind skeleton joints, their current parent and their next parent ( the control rig).
With this table, you can change between parents with the "Disconect Control Rig" and "Connect Control Rig" buttons.
This is really helpfull to do fixes or further tweaking to the rig disconnecting first the Bind Skeleton.

The interface is made in PyQt, but because of time, It misses a lot of features. I'm planing to do a better and more complete version, but for now, here are the download link and the installation instructions:


Download Control Rig Connecter

Installation:

1.- You need a PyQt module compiled for the version maya you are using, Nathan Horne already did a really usefull compilation of PyQt for Maya and post it on his website http://nathanhorne.com/?p=322 for Maya 2012 64 bits and  http://nathanhorne.com/?p=460 for Maya 2012 64 bits. You0ll need to install this in the maya-python directory (for example: "C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2012\Python").

2.- Run the script

3.- Select the group you want to add, It will add to the table the whole joint hiearchy.

4.- Highlight one element in the table to see where is it in your scene.

5.- Select the object you want to parent with

6.- Click the "Add Driver" button to add the object to the table.

7.- Add Drivers to all the joints you want to connect

8.- Save the table so you can use it later

9.- Now you can press "Connect Control Rig", if you want to restore the joints to their original parents press "Disconnect Control Rig"