Three posts in three days! I don’t actually have as much time as It appears I do; the iPhone WordPress app is very useful.
I’m finally at a good place with my rigging library of COFFEE functions that now when I code out a set or rig steps, things are behaving as I expect. I’ve recreated the “Wipix Leg” in code (if you’re not familiar with it, it’s a method for making a stable IK solution without the 90 degree pole vector flip trick in used in Maya), and I’m now at a point where I have to do some rig redesigning. In other words, I’m no longer fighting the code misbehaving– now I’m back to working on conceptual stuff.
I do plan on releasing some of what I’ve learned either for free here or on a DVD at some point down the line, with my function library.
One thing I found out that really put a thorn in my side is that my constraint code was made useless by changes to the Constraint tag in R11. By cleaning up how the tag works, Maxon has rendered the tag completely useless when working from COFFEE. I’m not sure whether Py4D will be able to do what’s needed; I won’t be able to begin porting my rig to Python until the whole thing is finished. However, because you can get selected objects as arrays through Py4D (and not through COFFEE) maybe there will be better constraint code workarounds in my future.
Also nice to discover was that the Wipix Leg works just fine in Blender. Stable leg IK was the one thing for which I didn’t have a setup I liked in Blender, but that problem is now sorted. Still thinking I’ll be using Blender for my short film because of it’s speed of use. I can build that leg from scratch in Blender in twenty minutes; it takes significantly longer in both C4D and Maya.