Transferring UVs AFTER rigging.... This is a tough one, but here's the HACK. Lets say you've rigged up your amazing character and realize OH, I have to make a bunch of UV changes. You copy out your character's head, UV it up nicely, bring it back in and use the "transfer attributes" from your copied head to the rigged one. No deal. It's because your transfer attributes input comes after rigging and all UV inputs have to come before rigging. Same as in Ncloth. I don't understand why Autodesk doesn't put in a "before deformers" option or something similar to how you can insert blendshapes at certain parts of a deformer chain. ANYWAY Every object has a "shape orig" node which represents what an object was before it was deformed. We can apply a UV transfer to this no problem which will also transfer up the stack to your rigged object. I access it like this 1. Select your rigged object, in the hypergraph hit options/display/ hidden nodes...
Cronin's 12 FPS animation method Well I wanted to come up with a way to animate within Maya on twos (every frame holds for 2 frames) then render out properly at 24 FPS without having to key every pose twice. I suppose one could animate at 24 fps and key every second frame twice. I decided to animate in Maya at 12 fps and set the render settings to render out twice as many frames, each keyframe duplicated. All done at render time. And here's how to do it. 1. In your preferences set the maya scene to 12 FPS. 2. In your globals set the 'by frame' to 0.5 - this will render sub frames inbetween (twice as many) i.e. frame 1, 1.5, 2, 2.5 .Maya will name the sequence properly. 3. For the subframes to be duplicates of the keys, they need to be the same values as the keys before them. Every frame needs a keyframe and every curve has to be stepped. This means we have to bake the animation curves and set them all to stepped before rendering. 4. Handy little MEL script to do that?....
STUFF LEARNED ABOUT OBJECT TRAVEL ACROSS SURFACE Oh dear... Sometimes trying to acomplish the most simple things leads to many discoveries about the tools that you use. I will most definitely have to catalogue this because I don't want to have to figure this out in the future.... Techniques to have multiple objects travel across a surface in random different directions while obeying surface normals and directions. My first intuition was to run random instanced particles across a surface and somehow stick them to the surface. This can be done. Make a surface live, sketch particles on, throw down some gravity and get those particles moving... *but what if you need to direct those particles and also have them 'stick on'? Gravity will tell them that if they hit an edge, to fall off the surface. Plus with fields, you can't direct particles as precise as a picky client wants them :) So I figured, why not make the surface a goal? Great! So the particles move towards the vertic...
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