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Character pipeline

I’ve been reworking the overall organization of my character pipeline, and here’s the result. On the figure below you can see the way a model is broken down into basic building blocks which are then assembled into the final puppet.

The picture below shows in more details the overall Maya folder structure of a single character (let’s say a biped). In the right-hand side is a list of MEL scripts used to assemble all the pieces together.

The great thing in following such a precise organization is that you can then follow the same rules for any character you build without having to stop and wonder where you stored this or that file.

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  1. June 28th, 2011 at 17:48 | #1

    It is a pretty impressing workflow.
    Just a couple things I don’t understand.
    Is there a MEL script which can assemble the whole character from the separated pieces? Is it the bipedTemplate.mel? And what it is doing exactly?

    I guess the reason to separate components of the character like this some kind of flexible workflow. So you can change every piece independently.
    But I don’t see the reason to keep weights (is it a weight map or something custom file?), controls, and gui separately. And there are a couple of dependent thing. For e.g. the skin weight has to be changed if the geometry changes.
    I belive if you have geometry and skeleton separately you can bind it with skin weight via MEL but what is the main reason for that? (I guess production experience :)

    Do you use something to save these data separately? Bec I guess when you actually rigging a character you have all components in one scene file.

    Sorry if I’m asking too much :)

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