I started re-learning max a couple of weeks ago. It’s been a while since I’ve touched it. But I’m back on it now and I must say that I’m liking it. I even started fiddling with MAXScript a bit and made a ribbon style script. I haven’t seen many free rigs around compared to whats out there for maya so I thought I’d try and make my own. I’ve just been playing around with bones and a few other cool things that I failed to check out my first time around max before I moved on to maya. I think im up to the stage where I can make an animatable character…we shall see….

Here’s a little script that automates a ribbon style rig that’s seen a lot in toon style animations. It works great with Micheal Comet’s stretchy IK set up.

Description:
Creates 3 of these: bone, Bone-controller, Bone-controller-controller.
Creates 3 bone objects that is link to its own controller, which is linked to its own controller, which has position and rotation constraints on it based on 2 objects selected (where the setup is created between their pivot points). The bones created are what you would skin geometry to.

More info later when I’ve tested this script out.

http://www.flowerfoe.com/misc/nRibbon_v6.ms

Check out the above image max file done in about 10 mins:
http://flowerfoe.com/misc/ribbonTestLeg.max

You might have noticed that the blog has gone through a few changes. Well, that’s because it has.

A bit of info about the main character on the home page:
- He’s one of the characters for Flower-foe, my short film that I’m planning to do…one day.
- It’s vector rendered out of Maya’s Ravi renderer. I thought i’d give it a try. There’s not a great deal of control but for simple vector stuff like this it did the job well.
- He’s going to do a lot more shit like sleep during the day and wake up at night. Right now all he’s doing is a crappy walk cycle. I basically just put that there for the time being until I get the idea right. Dont get too attached to it.

Here is a screen shot of the rig

I used my little script to rig the face. It’s based on a theory of parenting techniques I was contemplating about a while ago. You can try it out for yourself if you like:

http://flowerfoe.com/misc/ninoFaceJ.mel

A few months after I made this I discovered something very similar to it at Highend3d.

http://www.highend3d.com/maya/tutorials/character/Facial-Animation-Rig-for-Delgo-276.html

I’ve gone though the whole tut and it is exactly the same process as how I made my face rigs but they use Clusters to skin the face and I smoothBind mine. Their way is actually much faster because they have a few scripts available there to streamline the process. So I recommend doing that instead of mine. But if you’re up for a challenge then …

http://flowerfoe.com/misc/ninoFaceJ.mel