Rid Your Rigs of Wasteful unitConversion Nodes

Ryan Porter posts a Library of Maya nodes to do arithmetic on angles without polluting the scene with unitConversion nodes.

Rid Your Rigs of Wasteful unitConversion Nodes

If you do any type of rigging in Maya, you might realize that there are an abhorrent amount unitConversion nodes, once you graph all the things. That may seem pretty wasteful. After all, ultimately we are all looking for the most efficient solution, rather than spiderwebbing redundancies where they don’t necessarily need to be. In the case of using too many untiConversion nodes in your rigging, here is something that might help.

Ryan Porter has a library of Maya nodes that will perform calculations on doubleAngle values, without peppering the scene with all those unitConversion nodes. AngularNodes, consists of an angleBinaryOp, angleMultiOp, angleScalarOp, angleUnaryOp and clampAngle, all of which can be used to rid Your Maya rigs of wasteful unitConversion nodes.

If you are not familiar with the unitConversion Node in Maya, it can be a buffer between two nodes that use different types of units. This way you can ensure that the source value of 1 in the unit attribute is equivalent to 1 at the destination.

The AngularNodes suite include:

  • angleBinaryOp – Which will return the result of a binary operation on two inputs of type doubleAngle.
  • angleMultiOp – with can return the result of a reduce operation on an array of inputs of type doubleAngle.
  • angleScalarOp – Returns the result of a binary operation on two inputs, one of type doubleAngle, one of type double.
  • angleUnaryOp – Which will return a result of a unary operation on an input of type doubleAngle.
  • clampAngle – Returns the input value, restricted so that it does not exceed the min-max range.

Visit the Github repository for the angularNodes for Maya and check them out.