Skip to content

Tag: naming

Season 01 – Episode 43, 44, 45 – Bindings and Deformation

Bindings, Deformation, and More!

Hi all,

Cataloguing three episodes at once is a first for me, but these episodes are also somewhat particular.

On 43 I set off to clean things up, test them, and save a scene that I could share. Little did I know I fell into old habits, and as I consider coarse deformation necessary for testing I started laying out a skeleton. It’s at that point that I realized I had never really discussed how I formalize/compartmentalize deformation, let alone the notion of Bindings.

If you watch 43 first, the first few minutes promise that it will be a chill-out stream, but I was wrong, and things escalate quickly into explaining division of responsibilities for deformation.
While episode 43 was a rabbit-hole, but still satisfying, I decided to do another episode giving the subject the introduction it deserves as well as introduce some of the necessary standards in our rig, that would be episode 44.
By the end of 44 I had done enough, I feel, to clarify what bindings are and how I rationalize deformation, but still had work to do and practices/standards I wanted to discuss; enter episode 45, where the skeleton is finished and the scene finally cleaned up.

The subject sneaked up on me, and I regret not having planned for it, but only because I blew the introductions. The material itself I believe to be important, and I think the episodes did come together in the end and I’m glad I got to the subject now and had three consecutive days to treat it.

I do make a recommendation in episode 44 that I will repeat here:
It might be best if you watch the first twenty or so minutes of Episode 44 first, and then watch episode 43 and on from there.
I don’t think the material is ruined or incomprehensible without that order, but the theory at the beginning of 44 makes 43 come together better.

Because this is a lot of hours of video I’m not going to break down the episodes specifically, there’s a lot in there from the Bindings/Deformation formalities to career advice to the audience.

So, with all that said, here’s the three episodes back to back.

Enjoy!

Season 1, Episode 43

Season 1, Episode 44

Season 1, Episode 45

Season 01 – Episode 37 – Modular Components, Reassembling the Rig

Modular Components and Rig Assembly

I’ve talked about components being modular before and I’ve shown the I/O process in the past, but this time around we do it for real.

There isn’t anything specific that’s new, but I did kind of like how it went and I would recommend watching it. It will take you through the whole process of componentisation and assembly well enough.

There’s a bit of everything in it, Maya bugs, scripting, tiny amount of nodelling, Q/C, conforming, the actual I/O of the components…
All in all I feel it came out well paced and it covers a good chunk of ground in one hour.

To be a bit more specific: This is where we take all of our components and we push them through the I/O process (to file and from file) both for Q/C (Quality Control) as well as to actually re-assemble a full rig.

In the process I list a couple gotchas with containers, find a non-bug, and we write a trivial renaming script (more for variety than anything). All the work gets done on time, and we fix the last couple dirty bits in our components, which turned out to be bug-free, and only in need of some conforming.

QnA, the last dozen minutes or so, is mostly me rambling about rig standards, instrumenting rigs, and pipelines at scale and not.

As usual the code is available on GitHub in the didactic section but it really isn’t anything much.

Enjoy,

Pilot Season – Day 1

Thank you so much everybody who showed up for the stream.
For those of you who couldn’t, or wish to review, it’s now available on the YouTube Archive channel here: