Friday, March 6, 2009

About Time I post something!!!

Well, it sure has been a while since I posted something huh!?!? Sorry about that. I mean to post WAY more than I ever get around to. But, life for me has been extremely busy these past few months. In January, my wife and I had our second son! So, we now have a 7 week old and a 2 year old... Needless to say we're very tired;) But, things are slowly getting back to some kind of routine. I am finding some (if very little) free time before work and even some time after the family has gone to sleep (though, lately, I'm WAY too tired to keep up my late night routine) to work on Basic Guy and my other personal projects...

Anyway, I have some good news and some bad news about Basic Guys next release.

Bad News:
The new Basic Guy release that's coming down the pipe only works in Maya UNLIMITED. It has to do with how I handle the bendy limb stuff... I'm using "follicles" and that is a Maya Unlimited only feature. Above this post you will see a poll that I set up (about what version of Maya you're using). Please answer truthfully (though I dont know why you would make up the answer...). To be honest, I don't know how many people actually use Maya "Complete". For some reason my gut tells me that the vast majority of people are using Unlimited. So, the following image probably isnt that big of a deal (what BG looks like when opened in Maya Complete...gha!):



However, if a lot of you are using Complete then maybe I'll need to re-think the bendy arm/leg solution. Or, maybe I'll do a release that has the old rig but will include the other new "features".

Ok, now the good News:
As you can see in the image, Basic Guy is finally uv'd! I was waiting for a co-worker to paint a texture for him, but well, that's just taking WAY too long. So, I'm making my attempt at hacking something together for you all. I will release the Photoshop images for you all so that you all can easily customize and paint your own textures for him if you want.

Also, I want to release a "beta" version of him very soon (hopefully in a few days or so...). This way all of you who stop by my blog can play with him and help me make sure that he is ready for a bigger release.

Here's to a new Basic Guy release very soon!

Cheers and as always happy animating!
Tim

2 comments:

Bruno Andrade said...

Hi tim, thanks a lot for the good news. I always check your blog, I`m very anxious to work with basic guy.

Great to know we will be able to customize the textures, that´s always nice.

thanks again and keep rocking

PS: will there be a GUI? with basic facial shapes etc?

Philip Crow said...

Heya, I'm using your rig now for an animation for my demo reel. I like it a lot! It's a very powerful rig.

Some things that might make it better would be to make the added attributes more consistent, like all the foot controls are different in their set driven keys. The top spin flys from -5 to 5, while the bank is a nice -10 to 10 and then the toe curl doesn't even have a limit. So some consistency in things like that would be very helpful/nice. I like to use a -10/10 on most of mine.

But ya, that's just a nit picking, I love the rig and hope to get it on my reel before i graduate next week, so probs not but I can try.