Exploring Human Muscles Setup in Maya Course

Here is my latest course on rigging human using Autodesk Maya Muscles for Digital Tutors:

http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/exploring-human-muscles-setup-maya-2395

Over 6 hours detailed workflow, great as an introduction to anyone learning how to use muscles in rigging. Anatomy examples and custom Python tools included. Thanks to Pavel Hruboš who did test animations and Jan Jinda for providing werewolf model.

TurtleDefaultBakeLayer problem resolved

If you are using Maya 2014, 2015 or 2016 you might have seen this object in your scene TurtleDefaultBakeLayer, which you didn`t create. Maya was generating this automaticly since they acquired Turtle Renderer.
This was quite annoying. So now Autodesk has fixed this problem, if you download Maya 2016 Service Pack 5:
https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/maya/downloads/caas/downloads/content/maya-2016-service-pack-5.html?v=2016

Once you install SP5, Turtle plugin is not set to Loaded by default, unless you switch it to Autoload. This is how it should be.

If you cannot use Maya 2016 SP5, then you can use this python script for unlocking this node and deleting it:
import maya.cmds as mc
mc.lockNode('TurtleDefaultBakeLayer',l=0)
mc.delete('TurtleDefaultBakeLayer')

More about Turtle Renderer for Maya here:
https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/maya/getting-started/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/ENU/123112/files/turtle-html.html

CGI Dreamworks Animation Studio Pipeline - YouTube

CGI Dreamworks Animation Studio Pipeline - YouTube:



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Want to Own Coraline? Laika to Auction 250 Pieces From Its Films

Want to Own Coraline? Laika to Auction 250 Pieces From Its Films:



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Point Constraint Offset Polarity

Really cool feature that can be sometimes handy - you can change amount of offset of the Maya Point Constraint. This was probably added in Maya 2011. The attribute is called Offset Polarity and is 1.0 by default. This basically multiplies the amount of offset from the target in local space. Nice in-built feature.
And unlike the Rest Position, doesn`t jump to the position, but make continous move to the target (or between targets).