Intro: This is a personal learning project my good friend David Bokser and I have endevoured upon to have a solid rigging tool to use in our professional and personal work . A large part of my desire to do it is to really focus on rigging for a while as that looks to be the professional option for me that will afford the most remote freelance opportunities as Houston will be my home for the forseeable future and I only wanna do so many onsite gigs during the year. Bokser is a python whiz kid so it's great to be learning so much from him.

In a nutshell: At the end of the project, we'll have a tool to rig pretty much anything. Provides for different types of rig types or the arm/spine/etc

Status: In production between gigs and on them as tools become necessary for work. Started in January 2011.

Core Tools and some examples from them that I've written...

• RiggingComponents (example
  • finRigger
    (objectNull,spineChain,mirror,mode,jointsPerChain,deformChains,ctrlChains)
• DistanceTools - tools for all kinds of functions in terms of dimensions
  • getClosestObject (targetObject, objectArray)
  • getClosestUV (targetObject,surface)
  • getAverageDistanceBetweenObjects (objArray)
• AttributeTools - tools for dealing with attributes
  • storeObjToMessage (obj, storageObj, messageName)
  • findMessageAttrs(obj)
• NodeTools
• JointTools
  • createJointChainsFromLoftSurface (name,surface,directionMode,reverse)
  • attachJointChainToSurface (jointChain,surface,jointOrient,jointUp)
  • makeJointControlSurface(startJoint,controlJointList,outChannel,name):
• NamingTools
  • renameJointChainList (jointList, startJointName, interiorJointRootName)
  • renameObjectListFromList (objArray,nameArray)
• RiggingTools
  • locMeObj(obj) - makes a locator matching it's target objects, position, rotation, and matching rotation order as well.
  • locMeCVsOnCurve (curve)
  • grpMeObj(obj,parent):
    """pass an object into it and get group placed at the pivots - matching translation, rotation and rotation order and grouping it under the grp if True and to the world if False """
• SkinTools
  • controlSurfaceSmoothWeights (surface)
  • querySkinCluster (obj) - yay for python not having mel equivalencies....
• SearchTools
  • returnListNoDuplicates (searchList)
  • returnCVCoordsToList(surfaceCV)