CGMonks with a post on their new tool called Locinator for Maya which is a tool for dealing with locators and tracking objects to locators. This is a sneak look at the CGM.Locinator tool for Maya, if you are interested and want sign up to be a tester, there’s a link on the contact page.
The CG Monks are David Bokser, Josh Burton & Ryan Comingdeer who founded CGMonks for like minded tinkerers who like making and sharing stuff with the computer animation community – be that rigs, tools, short films or any other type of things cg artists enjoy playing with.
Check out the page and notes for CGM.Locinator for Maya here.
The Maya Locinator Tools serves a few main functions:
- Creates locators based off of selection types. Those created on objects with transforms also match the rotation order of their respective sources.
- Stores info (via attribute) on what they were created from so that they can be updated (snapped to the correct position if the source changes)
- Objects with transforms that have a loc created from are tagged (via message node) so that they can be snapped to their loc
- There is an option to force the bounding box center of an object instead of it’s pivot point for the positional data of the loc
- Things that can be updated (locators or tagged objects) can be baked per frame or only on frames with keys
- There are some special functions:
- locate center – works for objects or components (i.e. finding the center of an edge loop for joint placement loc)
- loc closest point – the base functionality was there so I added it. It’s root functions I used for a snap to surface tool that is helpful for all kinds of things
- loc cv’s of curve – easy to snap to or track for a motion trail
- loc cv’s on the curve – because sometimes the end user wants the edit point and doesn’t know it
Some day to day examples of use are:
- I have a character who’s hand I want to track some object. For whatever reason I can’t setup a dynamic parent constraint on it. So I loc that hand, constrain that loc to the object and then I can force track that hand to the object over whatever frames
- Need to edgeloop centers on a mesh to place joints
- Want to track a face on the tip of a nose but don’t want the performance hit of a rivet constraint. Animate it. Bak down an updated pass on the loc and turn on motion trails for it
