Found this ancient video on my skelescripts while cleaning out my hard drive. It was kind of a pre-Genoma thing, and one of the earliest incarnations to my knowledge of the concept of modular rigging (creating rigs out of reusable components, such as a centaur given a human and horse rig and just being able to assemble new rigs out of existing parts). I created my own scripting language and interpreter for it (as well as syntax highlighting text editor using LWPanels which is kind of a pain to implement using only the panel API of LW). I ended up creating the scripting language instead of using an existing one primarily to allow it to be totally compatible with LSCommander syntax in case users wanted to copy and paste commands from Layout. On top of this it added functions, loops, conditional branching, closures, etc. The idea wasnt to get users to write scripts every time they created a rig. Instead the scripts were embedded inside the skelegons, allowing the skelegons to be mirrored, copied and pasted, shared with other users, and ultimately reused like crazy. The idea was to script as few reusable components as possible and then combine rigs out of an existing library of rig assets (arms, legs, feet, spines, etc). This system was more for people who wanted to program Genoma itself using a polygon-embedded scripting language, for example, rather than people who wanted to use Genoma. The people who wanted to use it would just work with the library of pre-built skelescripts. Thought Id share it since I had some people asking about it. It was one of the things I developed outside of NT back when I was on my own and designing my own tools. I offered it for free to the company before, but unfortunately there wasnt much interest back then in this kind of rigging stuff, and I eventually lost the source code outright. Sometimes I feel like I should have waited 10 years before I made it, since I dont think the concept of modular rigging was popular at all back then and pretty much unheard of, but the idea seems to be much more popular now. Feel a little bit bitter about it since it was pre-Genoma, pre-RHiggit, and all kinds of other stuff, but was powerful enough to be a building block for these, and also took me a month of working on my own to make it (a month on my own is like a year in a company since its 100% programming and design, no collaboration overhead). I often wonder what it could have been like if I continued to work on this. I originally made it after tediously following rigging tutorials on making an IK foot, for example, that took me like a whole hour to follow. And I thought that was dumb, at the very least I wanted to be able to capture the tutorial in a script embedded inside a series of foot bones so that I can just bring up the foot any time I needed it. And so skelescripts were born. Unlike powergons, these scripts were truly embedded inside the polygons in a way that allowed self-referencing of the polygon. As a result, it made polygons into smart assets, fully aware of themselves with a me reference rather than just a dummy asset that executes a script that has no awareness of itself. Note: the delays in the vid switching from modeler to layout are due to Hub synchronization. The actual skelescript conversion process took milliseconds, and it was significantly faster to execute than powergons or LScripts as it used the native C API and a very fast interpreter.
Posted on: Wed, 17 Sep 2014 20:26:56 +0000