Rig it Right 3rd Edition – update

I’m in Maya 2023, going through the book, and things are still very solid. Yipee! Finished the first pass for Part One of the book and nothing seriously broke. I caught most of the updates that occurred in 2018 already. Go, previous me! The simple models were fine and didn’t need updating really. They are clean quads, etc. Good. Next, a first pass on the biped.

Writing buddy: I do have a new writing buddy. I dog sit this one and he watches me write and I’ve taught him how to click. He can press the pad and click (sometimes when I don’t want him to.) But he has to watch everything I do on the computer and I’ve learned to type around him.

Sabbatical: I received a sabbatical from Savannah College of Art and Design that will fund two of the new chapters going into this book. One chapter is on edgeloops and the other is on parallel processing in Maya. The sabbatical itself is studying model edgeloops and how they bend and animate. Then that result is compared to the drawovers done in 2d for animation notes. Inbetween, of course is the rig. At the end, I’ll look at making the rig fast in parallel mode.

Pixar: My first stop will be to visit Pixar and talk to some old friends, see what I learn on edgeloops there, and put it into the chapter.

I’m waiting for a new Mac with a M2 pro chip. Maya now supports that natively. I’ll be able to retest this first part of the book to make sure it is good to go in Maya 2024 and compare it to a PC. I’m curious.

Rabbit Hole: Speaking of being curious – I’m also sidelined by Welcome Home. I don’t see any hex or binary in there. Morse code, yes. Fun hidden things in images, yes. Multiple websites and layers, yes. I really don’t have time for that rabbit hole. I don’t. The use if “it’s” and “its” incorrectly to point to an image (which uses it’s correctly) that says phones are important and potentially there’s a code there in the dial, then the phone shows up in a hidden page (which you got the url by finding offset letters in the webpage and trying a million combinations and you could just write a script to run through them all if you gave it a minute) and if you click on the phone you get a recording that has morse code in it. Don’t have time for it. Gotta write a book, and finish up the spring quarter. But that image is cut off and I found the whole image in a wiki and who is Julie? And why does that image have the .png extension when it isn’t a .png? But it is office hours soon and I have to teach, then write more. Good job on that puzzle.