Monday, December 14, 2009

Finished my first real melscript tool!

I just finished my first melscript tool by the name of dhAnimCurveFilter. I will probably make this download able on my website soon as I figure out how to. Basically I was told by one of the animators, Louaye, about how the Animators often (even me when I used to animate) select curves, in this case, all the spine controls, then having to shift select each rotateX, for example, in order to see a filtered view of all the rotateX curves of the selected controls. He asked me if I can either show him a way to filter just those curves, so I offered to make a UI.

Took me about two days to finish it as its first version and my first public script. I had to study and learn quite a bit from Erick Miller's Pose2Shelf script to get mine working because not only did I make the UI to allow them to select a bunch of check boxes for all the translate, rotate, and scale axises to be filtered, I wanted them to be able to save that selection onto the shelf for quicker selecting if they wanted to. The shelf maker actually took the most time to figure out. The filtering itself was quite easy to do but I like making tools with multiple functions and even if they didn't ask for it, seemed like a nice bonus to do.

So basically with the UI open, they can check a few boxes, select the controls they want filtered, then hit a button and in the graph editor, you'll see just those animation curves of those controls. It does it by actually selecting the animation curves, not actually shift selecting or highlighting the curve in the graph editor like the animator normally would. There's another button to save to shelf with a textField for them to type in a name to save it as. I'll try to post pictures or a video when I can.

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