Animation, 3D scripts and tools, stuff and nonsense

Usually point caching systems will only deal with objects that are driven by deformation (eg, nCache) – hence the name, point caching. Other bigger, badder systems (eg, alembic) can cope with both transforms and deformations. However, what if you have a transform driven object that you desperately need to export to a point cache?
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There was a follow up to an old discussion on the Softimage mailing list concerning transferring particle instance orders from Soft into Maya. I thought I’d document what I said earlier.
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Shave and a Haircut… interesting bit of kit.

I’ve been needing to duplicate hair setups onto meshes that aren’t world aligned (they have different animation caches on them, otherwise the same mesh), which means that Shave’s built in duplicating tools won’t necessarily work. For some reason, trying to script the duplication and plugging in a new mesh wasn’t working, until i decided to call a scene refresh. That fixed it! The old refresh trick…

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In rigging land, and I’m making a rotation driver from built-in maya nodes. This usually drives some front of chain blendshapes (use Chad Vernon’s awesome cvShapeInverter tool) to do corrective blends. This is similar in concept to the Comet poseDeformer.
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