wip's

I've got a number of works in progress that should be seeing the light of day in the not too distant future. First off, I've already started the rewrite of the JTDriggingTools. When I started this project over a year ago it was half utilitarian and half learning experience. Now that I've got a better handle on things, I felt like a complete overhaul was in order. Last night I got pretty close to finishing off the new arm rig. This time around there's less restrictions on how you rig things - for example you no longer have to specify if it's for the left or the right side because it works with any position or orientations in the world space. Also I'm doing a proper implementation of rig primitives so it's now possible to make as many arms or legs or spines as you want and easily hook them all together. It's also possible to unrig things with the press of a button. Besides cleaning up the code and making it smarter I'm also throwing in new features all the time. For example the arms and legs now have smooth stretch (so the IK handles dont "pop" when they hyper extend) and I significantly improved the auto-bending feature to get bendy elbows/knees for free. Also, I'm finally taking into account rotation orders which are untouched in the previous versions. It's already a huge improvement over the old code and quite a lot of fun to see it working the way I had envisioned it from the start. By the time it's done, you'll wonder where all the errors went!

Also in the pipeline is a rewrite of the andy rig. Once the rigging tools are done Andy will get a complete overhaul to use the new rig. I'm planning on remodeling it to better accomidate clothes and body blendshapes and making an all new facial setup. Some friends let me look over their shoulder at the animation mentor rig and it gave me a few ideas, so expect bishop to positively influence Andy 2.0.

Now if only I was getting paid for all this I could have some extra Vespa money :-)