Beer glass scene creation
This course contains a little bit of everything with modeling, UVing, texturing and dynamics in Maya, as well as compositing multilayered EXR's in Photoshop.
# 1 12-02-2006 , 02:16 AM
skywola's Avatar
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Join Date: Jan 2004
Location: Tempe, Arizona, USA
Posts: 224

Character Animation Via MEL

I'm posting this in the MEL scripts forum as I did not get much feedback on it in the other forum . . .

I have created a MEL program that automatically animates both biped and quadraped characters, without using IK or any of that other crap that takes forever to set up . . . In this case, all you do is click a button on the shelf, choosing a biped or quadraped, and it creates the skeleton for the character AND when you press the play button the character walks or runs. The quadraped also hops or gallops. It is all done via MEL, so it does not require and fooling with IK, and it has "stabilization" which minimizes having to paint skin weights.
When created, the bones are in the pose position, and you then attach the character to it, hit play, and the character walks or runs away. Just like that . . . . if you hit rewind, you can re-pose the character. You can make the character walk or run in any direction, or create a crowd of characters, all walking or running in different directions.

It has a toggling control that allows you to manipulate all the fingers of each hand at once, to open or close the hand or you can toggle it to control the fingers individually.

I have heard people say that using the computer to calculate the motion for a character is a bad idea, that it takes a lot of processing power and render time . . . . I don't see any difference myself, quite frankly. So I am wondering what other people might think about this . . . . if this code was done as a plug-in it would be very fast . . . . So I wonder what other people on this forum might think of this . . . could it be commercially viable as a plug-in?
Would anyone be interested in writing it as a plug-in?


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