Sliding and Bulging Effects Using Soft Mods in Maya

Posted on November 28, 2016 - category: character-rigging

In this Maya rigging tutorial, you will learn how to animate the falloff center of a Soft Mod. This lets you animate a bulge moving along an object.

I worked as the character rigger on a fantastic short film called “Majora’s Mask - Terrible Fate” by Ember Lab. I used Soft Mods in Maya to create a bulging effect in the Mask Salesman’s backpack. This makes it look like objects are bouncing around inside the fabric. By connecting it …

“Random Enough” - Hacking Past Your Problems When Prototyping

Posted on November 21, 2013 - category: tech-art

In this blog post I’ll talk a bit about prototyping games or apps and moving quickly when stuck in a tricky programming problem.

I’m currently prototyping a circular puzzle game. Part of the game is about matching colors to their neighbors. I wanted a way to start the level by randomizing the blocks while having no neighboring tiles that were the same color.

However, I didn’t want to spend the time to figure out if there was …

Manually Create a Single Maya Follicle in Python

Posted on February 22, 2013 - category: character-rigging

Do you use Maya follicles to pin objects to your geometry? Are you still doing it the old way, by creating a Hair System and then deleting all the parts you don’t need? Below I’ll share my simple Maya Python script that creates and pins a single follicle onto a nurbs surface. (Jump straight to the script.)

I love using follicles. They adhere to a nurbs or poly surface and they maintain a good, predictable orientation in normal …