animation courses Anomalia go for year 2011!

I`m pleased that ANOMALIA animation courses taking place in Czech Republic has got new funding from EU Media for teaching in next year 2011:
www.anomalia.eu

This course is taking place during summer in a beautiful town Litomysl during summer with highly experienced moderators teaching different areas of 3D animation. For example two animation teachers are working in Pixar, Maya scripting teacher is a Technical Director from Blue Sky Studios (Ice Age).

I believe the language used during classes is english.

bindPreMatrix in skinCluster

this is little more advanced stuff for riggers. If you want to know more about this basic deformer, how it computes the deformation, watch this tutorial:

http://sunekempf.com/blog/wp-content/movies/bindPreMatrix/bindPreMatrix.html

I actually found it when I needed to make Reset SkinCluster Influence tool and I tried to set WorldMatrix to preBindMatrix. Which was wrong, it needs worldInverseMatrix and Sune`s tutorial helped me here.

And as the tool is so simple, I decided to post it here:

def resetInfluenceMatrices( skinCluster ):

'''
set bindPreMatrix the same as current worldInverseMatrix
for each influence of given skinCluster
'''

infs = mc.listConnections( skinCluster + '.matrix' )

for i, inf in enumerate( infs ):

    m = mc.getAttr( inf + '.worldInverseMatrix' )
    mc.setAttr( skinCluster + '.bindPreMatrix[' + str(i) + ']', m[0], m[1], m[2], m[3], m[4], m[5], m[6], m[7], m[8], m[9], m[10], m[11], m[12], m[13], m[14], m[15], typ= 'matrix' )
 

Houdini autorig

Looking at these Houdini pages makes me think why Maya still doesn`t come with some all-round scripted rig for biped and quadruped. There are many online, but something could be there as part of installation for general and new users.

http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini9.5/shelf/tooncharacter

riggers...

a though:

riggers are basically very family based guys - it`s all about parents, children, relatives and their connections!

"real" racer game

this is really cool, no simulated dynamics or modelled environment, but existing game level that you can touch :)

RACER DEMO 0.1 - video game mashup from sputnic on Vimeo.

rigging TD job

MPC Vancouver is looking for riggers for upcoming projects. This is not for immediate start, so there is no official job post yet. If interested in working in Vancouver, please contact Lead Rigger Angela Magrath: http://ca.linkedin.com/pub/angela-magrath/1/959/78a

For more jobs on this blog, click on "jobs" label.

Rage game-play

here`s very cool R@GE demo with Tim Willits playing it and asnwering questions. First time seen quite long continuous play of this game. It will be good old id action, run and shoot :)

couple of more things like customized weapons or upgrading cars, but still very simple.