Happy new year!!

Aniguild Freelance Animation is opened!

Aniguild Freelance Animation is the result of a union of professional animators, focused in character animation, film effects, commercials and shortfilms that offers its services through the internet and anywhere in the world.

If you’re looking for animators to make a spot or whatever, you could check Aniguild website to see what we offer.

Seems like too many people have problems when they’re trying to install LowMan. I’m going to try explain it more detailed.

NOTE: You can use LowMan with Maya 5.0, Maya 6.0 and Maya 7.0. For Those who have problems with LowMan and Maya 7.0, maybe they have not installed it fine.

• 1.- First, you need to open Maya.env in notepad or another text editor, like TextPad or whatever. You can find Maya.env file in the next folder or into 7.0 folder. If you can’t find it, just create it with notepad.

• 2.- Go to the next folder:

And copy the path. Write in the Maya.env: “MAYA_SCRIPT_PATH = ” without the quotes, and next to it paste the path.

• 3.- Go to the next folder:

And copy the path. Write in the Maya.env: “XBMLANGPATH = ” without the quotes, and next to it paste the path. NOTE: In Linux, you will have to write ”/%B” after this path.

• 4.- In this example, the Maya.env file is:

^{MAYA_SCRIPT_PATH = C:\Documents and Settings\user\Mis documentos\maya\7.0\scripts
XBMLANGPATH = C:\Documents and Settings\user\Mis documentos\maya\7.0\icons}

And That’s all folks!
Hope you haven’t problems installing LowMan now.

Happy Animating!

If you use to visit the others Aniguild members websites (if not you need to do it ;D ), maybe you already know about these really funny LowMen by Rodri Torres If not… check it out his incredible website. He has a really nice tutorial about run cycles with LowHero!

If you would like to animate a Ninja and you’re too lazy to make it with LowMan, Dan has sent me this LowNinja for all you. Thanks Dan!

Justin Barrett has write a great script to mirror any pose of any lowman. You can download his script in his website .

Thank you Justin!

I’ve made this little tutorial because Andrea Giovannini asked me if I could do it, so… If you like it, give thanks to Andrea :)

Before start, I want to say I leart the way of this rig looking inside a scene of Jason Schleifer who did a ballon dog for a cgtalk animation.
I’m sure that there’s so many ways to rig a ball and sure that these ways are best than this one, but this is how I did my ball rig.

Wrote this. Let’s go:

• 1.- Create a nurbs sphere and set translateY to “1”. Rename it to “ball”, delete history and do Freeze Transformations.

• 2.- Create a hierarquia of two joints with snap to grids like in “Image 1”, so the “joint1” has its translate on “0,0,0” and the translateY of “joint2” is “2”.

• 3.- Parent “ball” to “joint1”.

• 4.- Create a nurbs circle and scale in XYZ to “0.5”. Rename it to “SQSTdown_CTRL”. Duplicate it and set its translateY to “2”. Rename it to “SQSTup_CTRL”. Delete their history and do Freeze Transformation.

Ok, We’ve the basic controls. Now let’s do the hierarquia.

• 5.- Parent “SQSTdown_CTRL” and “SQSTup_CTRL” to “ball_CTRL” and parent “joint1” to “SQSTdown_CTRL”.

Now, we’re going to make the Squash and Stretch.

• 6.- Create an ikHandle from “joint1” to “joint2”

• 7.- Create a distanceDimension with “Create/Measure Tools/Distance Tool” from “joint1” to “joint2” with snap to grids or points. The Distance Tool will create two locators and a distanceDimension1 node.

• 8.- Parent “ikHandle1” and “the upper locator” (maybe “locator2”) to “SQSTup_CTRL”.

• 9.- Parent “the lower locator” (maybe “locator1”) to “SQSTdown_CTRL”.

You can try to move the controls and see that all work but without Squash and Stretch.

Now we’re going to create the differents connections to do it works.

• 10.- Connect “distanceDimensionShape1.distance” to “joint2.translateX” from “Connetion Editor” or writting this line into the “Script Editor” window:
  connectAttr -f distanceDimensionShape1.distance joint2.translateX;

  Make sure that in “Connection Editor” window you have loaded in the left side “distanceDimensionShape1” and not “distanceDimension1” because you won’t see the distance attribute with “distanceDimension1”.

• 11.- Select the “ball” and “distanceDimension1.Shape”, open the “Hypershade” window and click on “Input Connections” button. Create a “multiplyDivide” node from “Hypershade” window.

Now with these three nodes, we’re going to create the connections:

• 12.- Connect “distanceDimmensionShape1.distance” to “multiplyDivide1.input1X” and to “multiplyDivide1.input2Y” from “Hypershade” or “Connection Editor” window or writting this line into “Script Editor” window:
  connectAttr -force distanceDimensionShape1.distance multiplyDivide1.input1X;
  connectAttr -force distanceDimensionShape1.distance multiplyDivide1.input2Y;

  Set the “Operation” attribute of “multiplyDivide1” node to “Divide”. Set the attribute “input2X” to “2” and “input1Y” to “2” of the same node:
  setAttr multiplyDivide1.operation 2;
  setAttr multiplyDivide1.input2X 2;
  setAttr multiplyDivide1.input1Y 2;

  With this part we’ve created a division, so “outputX” will give us a number and “outputY” will give us the “outputX” invert. We’ve set the “input2X” and “input2Y” values to “2” in order that the division give us “1” in the default pose which it’s the default scale.

  Connect “multiplyDivide1.outputX” to “ball.scaleY” and connect “multiplyDivide1.outputY” to “ball.scaleX” and “ball.scaleZ”:
  connectAttr -force multiplyDivide1.outputX ball.scaleY;
  connectAttr -force multiplyDivide1.outputY ball.scaleX;
  connectAttr -force multiplyDivide1.outputY ball.scaleZ;

  

  Now when “scaleY” is “2”, “scaleX” and “scaleZ” is “0.5”, its invert ( 1/scaleY, in our example 2/scaleY*2 because our distance in its default value is “2”)

  We want that the “ball” scales from the floor, so translate its pivot to “joint1” (its floor) with snap to points or grids.

  And that’s the basic setup.

  Now, we can group “distanceDimension1” and “ball_CTRL” in a new group called “ball_group”. We can use this new group to scale the ball if we want. The problem is that if you scale “ball_group” we also “scale” the distance. So we need to add a new “multiplyDivide” node so when we scale “ball_group” this node multiplies the “Divide” value of “multiplyDivide1”.

• 13.- Select “ball” and “ball_group”,open “Hypershade” window and click on “Input Connections” node. Create a new “multiplyDivide” node.

• 14.- Connect “ball_group.scaleX” to “multiplyDivide2.input1X”. Set “multiplyDivide2.input2X” to “2” which is the default value of the distance:
  connectAttr -force ball_group.scaleX multiplyDivide2.input1X;
  setAttr multiplyDivide2.input2X 2;
• 15.- Connect “multiplyDivide2.outputX” to “multiplyDivide1.input2X” and “multiplyDivide2.outputX” to “multiplyDivide1.input1Y”. So we connect the scale value to the inverse of “multiplyDivide1”:
  connectAttr -force multiplyDivide2.outputX multiplyDivide1.input2X;
  connectAttr -force multiplyDivide2.outputX multiplyDivide1.input1Y;

  

  Now we can scale “ball_group” and all will work ( ignore the joint scale ;) )

  Also you can add another control which move a cluster for the central part of the ball like I did in my ballRig.

  Hope it’s useful and easy to understand.

Hi all,
I don’t know how it happened, but all the files have been deleted, so I’ve uploaded them again. Thanks to Paulien for the tip.

I’m pretty busy at work and I’ve not been able to work on LowMan 2.0 yet, but I’ll post some things about it soon.

Edit: Also I’ve fixed some problems with the comments.