2015
Digital Tutors
Beau Janzen
2:45
English

In this Maya tutorial, we'll explore a method of creating MEL scripts that automatically generate motion of a walking ant.
We’ll look at driving our ant’s stepping legs, head, antennae and secondary body motion with scripts that respond to the changing position of the ant. In addition, we’ll set up our rig so that the position of the ant can either be manually controlled by an animator, or guided by a procedural wandering path complete with automatic aim and pauses.
By the end of this Maya training, you’ll have learned techniques to better incorporate scripting and automation into your rigs.

1 Introduction and project overview
2 Examining procedural animation
3 Creating IK handles for the legs
4 Defining the stepping motion of the legs
5 Calculating the distance traveled per frame
6 Connecting the leg IK to locators
7 Generating step down motion in the feet
8 Creating reactive body motion
9 Visualizing noise functions
10 Scripting motion for the head
11 Scripting motion for the antennae
12 Scripting motion for the abdomen
13 Creating a switch for manual and auto wandering
14 Visualizing the smoothing of the path
15 Generating the noise for the wandering path
16 Defining the motion vectors for the path
17 Adding an exponent to the path smoothing
18 Connecting the smoothed noise to the transform
19 Creating random pauses for the wandering path
20 Setting up the animation for final render

Download File Size:706.66 MB

---