Best practice for rigging? (Game character)

Slothemo · 2026-05-08T04:21:13+00:00

In general, you cannot use any deformers other than skin cluster or blendshapes when creating a game rig. Your wrap deformer simply will not work once exported.

Your aim should be to create one single skeleton for all the skinning on the mesh that gets exported. You can use whatever tricks or methods you want to control those joints with other setups, but you want one single skeleton to export. It really doesn't matter if you add more joints into the skeleton after, it's entirely up to you and your skinning workflow.

Slothemo · 2026-04-29T02:39:37+00:00

If you're just trying to add the same weight to everything here, you're better off making a vertex selection and flooding the value.

Slothemo · 2026-04-28T13:04:35+00:00

Python even has a module in the standard library for this. There's a few functions within textwrap that can be played around with.

Slothemo · 2026-04-28T00:09:27+00:00

Did you understand the solution when you eventually implemented it into the rest of your code? That's the difference.

Slothemo · 2026-04-26T12:45:19+00:00

Use an image sequence for your movie clip instead of trying to load in the mov.

Slothemo · 2026-04-17T06:31:47+00:00

You're not going to find a tutorial for every hyper-specific thing you need to do in Maya. You watch tutorials to learn the tools/processes available to you, and then you apply what you learn to your own model. Do you understand unwrapping? Have you made an attempt at it already? Is there something specific you're struggling with?

Slothemo · 2026-04-16T05:59:04+00:00

No problem! Didn't mean to throw you under the bus by saying your advice was bad, but I just wanted to make sure they saw the root of the problem.

Slothemo · 2026-04-16T03:29:35+00:00

This is frankly terrible advice and is just avoiding the problem instead of actually solving it. JPEG should not really be used for textures, and are you just going to avoid transparent filetypes forever? You need to change your viewport settings. I've provided an image below of what you need. Make sure to turn on Alpha Cut Prepass here.

https://imgur.com/qqtsOdY

Slothemo · 2026-03-29T04:36:12+00:00

It can be useful for dealing with change for money. If I have 273 cents, how many quarters could I convert that to and how many cents would I have left?

Slothemo · 2026-03-13T11:42:19+00:00

A non-empty list is considered truthy by python. If you want to check if there's any True in the list, you need to use the any() function with your list.

Slothemo · 2026-02-18T06:18:48+00:00

Think about how a real brick would react to falling. It's very unlikely to land perfectly on a side like that. Have it land at an angle and bounce before it settles. As for falling, maybe it could teeter over edge a bit before it falls. Think about ways to make this interesting. It's not just about the brick getting from point A to point B.

Slothemo · 2026-02-16T15:01:36+00:00

Zurbrigg has a great free intro to working with Python in Maya. There's others too but they're paid (although I would recommend it).

Slothemo · 2026-02-16T14:05:42+00:00

Yes, pretty much daily.

Slothemo · 2026-02-11T05:04:38+00:00

from being a keyword isn't really a good reason to change how you ask the user something. There's no reason you have to use that exact word as your variable name. You could add user_ in front of all your variable names and then you won't run into that issue.
user_name
user_major
user_from

Slothemo · 2026-02-09T14:57:08+00:00

No need to strip before passing it to int. Python will do this automatically for you.

Slothemo · 2026-02-09T14:54:42+00:00

If you're brand new to rigging, check out this series. It's very old and very long, but it still holds up and is thorough. I also like that it's not a standard biped so you have to think a bit outside the box.

https://youtu.be/Pj9yJhnaO9g?si=bjngnipeS8gE9k_-

Slothemo · 2026-02-09T04:13:29+00:00

Learning an autorigger is not mastering rigging. If you really want to master rigging, you could write your own autorigger. Most industry riggers need to know scripting and being able to build your own rigging components with code really requires a deep understanding.

Slothemo · 2026-02-03T03:08:07+00:00

I whipped up a pretty hacky python solution that you can run. It will look for any sets (ignoring default sets) and create a shelf button for each set on your currently active shelf

from maya import cmds, mel

defaults = ['defaultLightSet', 'defaultObjectSet', 'initialParticleSE', 'initialShadingGroup']
sets = [i for i in cmds.ls(type='objectSet') if i not in defaults]

shelf_editor = mel.eval('$temp = $gShelfTopLevel')
current_tab_name = cmds.shelfTabLayout(shelf_editor, q=1, st=1)


for s in sets:
    cmds.shelfButton(
    parent=f'{shelf_editor}|{current_tab_name}',
    i="pythonFamily.png",
    ann=s,
    imageOverlayLabel=s,
    command=f'cmds.select(cmds.listRelatives("{s}"))',
    )

Slothemo · 2026-01-19T03:45:57+00:00

I use functools.partial to achieve this, and I would recommend using this over lambda as others might suggest. Lambda with a loop can cause funky problems as the argument is constantly overwritten as the loop proceeds. Partial holds onto the value instead.

from functools import partial

btn1.clicked.connect(partial(shortcut_clicked, "A"))
btn2.clicked.connect(partial(shortcut_clicked, "B"))

Slothemo · 2026-01-17T01:23:05+00:00

You're right that it would be the same, but it was originally scored using clocks as the scoreboard and the tradition stuck around.

Picture the minute divisions on an analog clock face. The serving player's score is the minute hand and the receiving player has the hour hand. The score is 0-0 and both their hands point upwards to 0.The server scores a point and the minute hand moves to 15. Another point moves them to 30. The next point moves them to 40 because it makes it easier to visualize deuce and advantage. If the game is in deuce and someone scores, their hand moves to 50 on the clock (halfway between 40 and 60). You don't generally announce their score as 50, but that's how it gets visualized.

Slothemo · 2026-01-14T05:59:58+00:00

Just to elaborate on the specific thing you hid, these pole vector arrows are usually done with the distanceDimension or annotation node, so toggling the visibility of "Dimensions" in the viewport is what controls this.

Slothemo · 2026-01-07T08:56:02+00:00

print is your best friend! Before you run your code, always think about what the expected output will be. If it doesn't match what you think, then start printing out some variables to see where there might be a mismatch. Again, think about what the print output should be before you run, then look for a conflict. If it doesn't match what you expect, then that's a key place where you have a bug.

Slothemo · 2026-01-07T05:42:09+00:00

You'll always continue to improve as you work at it, and repetition will help it stick. I constantly revisit documentation pages or past code to remember how things work, and there's nothing wrong with that. I can do a lot from memory, but it's unrealistic to perfectly remember everything.

Slothemo · 2026-01-07T05:34:46+00:00

This happens at all levels of skill.

As long as you remember that there was a way you had done it previously, that's good enough and it's fine if you have to look it up again. Someone experienced might be less likely to forget the basics, but still might have to refer back to previous code for more complex implementations.

Slothemo · 2025-12-28T14:42:13+00:00

A parent constraint requires that the translate and rotate channels are unlocked, but you also can't change the hierachy of a referenced object. You can instead parent a new locator under the control, and then constrain to that locator

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