While we are clearing bugs and tidying up at work, I’ve been taking the time to review some pipeline stuff and consider the changes required for future projects.

A good deal of time over the last few days has been spent in maxscript again – ripping old scripts apart, tidying them up, collection functions together etc. I’ve also spent hours learning new scripting so that I can automate our rigs even more. This includes experimenting with the roll/twist/helper bones and seeing how then can be made better. As well as changing them, I’ve written a bunch of usfu functions:

• Get the start and end points of bones
• Calculate midpoints
• Creating bones with names, custom tags, fins and colours

And of course building up a collection of useful commands, like wiring and lookat constraints.

thanks go to all those kinds folks at the CGTalk maxscript forums for helping me with syntax and also with other ways of approaching a problem.

A small post to say that I managed to write some fairy nice code that links my joysticks to bones, allowing me to specify angle limits. It all works as planned in my tests at home, but breaks on certain real world hierarchies.

This is something I need to figure out before I post a breakdown of it, but for those interested, the code is available here:

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=98&t=563367