Well well well... look who finally got around to updating his blog! Yep, it's about time I do something here!Anyway, I have a new Basic Guy release for you all (really, my blog should be called "Basic Guy's Blog"). The rig is more or less the same as what you're used to. But, I did do some renaming of controls here and there (trying to clean up the scene slightly). There are also some other small(ish) changes that would make merging an old animation somewhat of a pain to do (but still doable).
New feature breakdown:
1) a new GUI
-- for selecting rig parts
-- fk/ik matching
-- for animating the face
2) GUI can work with multiple Basic Guys in one scene
-- NOTE: you must use namespaces for the GUI to work with multiple Basic Guy characters (or else you get name clashing and it confuses the mel).
I recommend watching the "new feature overview" movie (strong coffee is highly recommended for viewing):
Basic Guy v3.3.1 New Features Overview
Anyway, that more or less covers his new features. It may not seem like a lot of noticeable change, but I think that the new GUI and ability to have more than one Basic Guy in the scene is pretty cool. However, I am still working on a Basic Guy design over haul. Well, a co worker has been putting some time into that for me (he's a much better modeler than me!). As to when that will be ready? Good question. He seems to be close, but well, we keep changing our minds on things and he isn't getting paid to do this for me. But, Basic Guy is going to look quite a bit different in his next release (But, hopefully, still look like Basic Guy).
So, here is the new Basic Guy release (drum roll please!!):
Basic Guy v3.3.1
NOTE: I should mention that I created Basic Guy v3.3.1 in Maya 2010 and back converted to Maya 7. When I opened the GUI in Maya 7 there was an error message about "hud". You can ignore this. It doesn't affect the GUI script. If I find some time I'll try to write a GUI script that is more friendly with previous versions of Maya.
Hopefully, my next post will be sooner rather than later... but then again, I always say that ;)
cheers and happy animating!
Tim
