RSS FeedRelease Versions of IKFK Solver & Animatable PivotMarch 17th, 2010
Well… after several weeks of beta testing, thousands of lines of code, and hundreds of cups of coffee, the release version of the free plugins ikfk solver and the animatable pivot constraint are now available. The latest version of the solver has several improvements, it’s stable and it can now work perfectly with the pivot constraint and any other kind of setups. Download them from here:
http://joleanes.com/scripts_plugins/IKFKSolver.php
http://joleanes.com/scripts_plugins/animatablePivot.php
It has been the work of only one person here, but a lot of people have assisted me in the Quality Assurance part of the project. Maybe something have been missed in the vast amount of things that had to be considered to make these tools working perfect, if that happens and you find any bug or any improvement that these tools should have, don’t hessitate to email me at joleanes@gmail.com. In the next few days I’ll be publishing a video tutorial to implement these tools in your rigs, so you can make the most of it.
I have to give special thanks for their useful suport in QA to these people: Carolina Delgado, Alejandro Albarracin, Ian Arias, Paul Hormis, Toke Jepsen.
Rolling ChainFebruary 5th, 2010
Other topic to the technical stuff: A thousand and one ways to rig a chain of bones!!!… naaahhhhh that’s too many, meanwhile it’s going to be only one.
I tried this aproach, it seems easy to use and also has the posibility to give a lot of control to the animator (Click Image).
IKFK SolverJanuary 13th, 2010
Usually a rigger has the duty of solving several technicals problems and building a lot of diffirent kind of rigs, but sometimes it’s job can become too mechanical, like having to do something that is supossed to be automatically created by the tool. Since i started to learn rigging i saw the process of rigging an arm or leg like that: too mechanical, even a lot of tech artist preffer to create a script to make this rigging process automatic.
Well, in order to rig a leg you have to do this: create three hierarchies. The first is used to transform the leg in IK, the second in FK, and the last is used to blend between those two. Some sort of UI controls have to be created to control the switching and matching mechanism and other expressions has to be used in order to implement squash & stretch… that’s the most common technique using default rigging tools.
Now there is other alternative, it’s an IKFK solver, and it’s job is to automate all that process by just having only one hierarchy that can be transformed in both modes (IK and FK) depending on the needs of the animator.
It would be nice if you can give it a look. It is a beta version and it could have some bugs, i haven’t saw any by now, maybe i have to look deeper 
.
Check this video: http://joleanes.com/scripts_plugins/IKFKSolverVideo.php
And download it from here: http://joleanes.com/scripts_plugins/IKFKSolver.php
Improving the siteDecember 30th, 2009
Hi, the site has been a little quiet for a while, i have been under extreme pressures, so it has been dificult to me… you know… i have to put sun protection, wear my hat and drink my margarita here in the beach before the sunset .
but well… i have made a small improvement to the site, now the home page is a blog, so it has some of the adventages of being a blog, like RSS feed.
I Hope you had fun in this december… working or composing poems, and i wish you a happy new year… see you in 2010!
Procedural Animation Experiment #3, MechDecember 4th, 2009
I received a suggestion in the threedy forums about my next Procedural Experiment and it sounded really cool so i gave it a try, This time the challenge was bigger and more interesting as well.
Procedural Bipedal Mech Walk:
Advertisement workNovember 17th, 2009
Here i am posting an advertisement animation that i work in some months ago, it was kind of crazy because of the anatomy of the characters and the look that was proposed, but it was a lot fun. They are bacteriums that looks like little harmless creatures because of the big cleaner power of the soap. If real bacteriums were like that, surely i would never wash my hands again :’(…
Procedural Animation Experiment #2, SnakeNovember 11th, 2009
The Video in this article is not suitable for Ophidiophobic People, I am a snake lover so now i am trying to bring some of them to Life, I only hope that their fangs don’t grow up too much because i also have some lovely rats to take care of.
Take a look at how this charming creature is behaving inside 3ds max:
