Scripting is like cooking...Part 2
So the second bit of this Cooking/Scripting analogy...
This week I was instructed to start looking over a bunch of characters that were done before my time. What I noticed was inconsistencies in the hierarchies, a lot of transforms without children, and different naming conventions for the same joints.
If I'm going to employ tools in the future that can parse and deal with the various body parts, it would sure be nice if they were always named the same thing.
So I wrote a quicky tool in a few hours to deal with this. Doing it by hand was out of the question, because I had a big checklist and I was sure to miss some detail and continue propogating the problem. My current list has 17 characters, so the time to do this by hand would really add up.
I settled on a "gold standard" character whose hierarchy would be used to compare all the other hierarchies.
And I went to the "fridge" of previously written code to borrow code which could be redeployed in the tool. This is a real time saver, when you can look at how you handled a problem before, and not have to reinvent the wheel. I borrowed and modified parsers, cobbled quick interfaces together, pop-up windows and file writers. It does all the functions and adds them to a log file so I have a record of what was done.
What I wound up with:
1. A "promptDialog" window pops up asking me to name the character which leads all the info written to the log file.
2. It automatically renames a bunch of standard non-conforming names of joints like the pelvis, fingers and foot parts.
3. It deletes all transforms that have no children, but not joints, ikHandles or effectors.
4. It pops up a scroll window that gives me a summary of what was done. If it looks like something necessary was deleted, then I'll reload the character and fix the code. So far, I haven't had this problem since the third iteration of the code.
5. It pops up a scroll window that gives me a list on top of joints that exist in the "gold standard" character that don't exist in the character that is being fixed. On the bottom, it gives me a list of joints in the character being fixed that don't exist in the "gold standard" character. Sometimes it's because the character being fixed has joints that the "gold standard" doesn't have like a tail and ears. Or some joints are named with joints that have their lettered incrementers jumping sequence because at one point intermediate joints were removed for redundancy.
But this all gives me a visual list to investigate. It alerts me to name formats that are out of conformity with the general naming convention. It points out joints that were never renamed from the default. It's a very good summary of things that might need to be looked at, and appropriately targeted.
6. It pops up another window with a final checklist for hierarchy conformity that also includes what objects need to have "inherit transforms" turned off.
When all this is done, it writes to a log file. I go and hand edit the log file with any additional steps I take with the lines of hand edited items indented, and finally, I add the file name that the newly fixed character was saved under.
With this, I was able to conform 16 of the 17 characters in under 4 hours (which only took that long because I was updating the code as I found problems, and wrote a new sg_rig utility which I'll need for a different stage of zeroing rotations later).
And then there's the new sg_rig utility. This pops up a summary of the rotation, rotation axis, joint orient and rotation order for specific joints I need to be certain conform to standards we need to meet. I borrowed some of the window code from the naming and hierarchy cleanup of the earlier utility script for that.
I wrote the utility because, while I had the characters up, I wanted to get a preview of the work I had ahead of me and to anticipate some upcoming problems I see with correcting them. I'll have my work cut out for me next week. I'm getting some ideas for maybe logging old data and correcting animation files being loaded from earlier work based on that old data (just in case dealing with this becomes my problem).
This week I was instructed to start looking over a bunch of characters that were done before my time. What I noticed was inconsistencies in the hierarchies, a lot of transforms without children, and different naming conventions for the same joints.
If I'm going to employ tools in the future that can parse and deal with the various body parts, it would sure be nice if they were always named the same thing.
So I wrote a quicky tool in a few hours to deal with this. Doing it by hand was out of the question, because I had a big checklist and I was sure to miss some detail and continue propogating the problem. My current list has 17 characters, so the time to do this by hand would really add up.
I settled on a "gold standard" character whose hierarchy would be used to compare all the other hierarchies.
And I went to the "fridge" of previously written code to borrow code which could be redeployed in the tool. This is a real time saver, when you can look at how you handled a problem before, and not have to reinvent the wheel. I borrowed and modified parsers, cobbled quick interfaces together, pop-up windows and file writers. It does all the functions and adds them to a log file so I have a record of what was done.
What I wound up with:
1. A "promptDialog" window pops up asking me to name the character which leads all the info written to the log file.
2. It automatically renames a bunch of standard non-conforming names of joints like the pelvis, fingers and foot parts.
3. It deletes all transforms that have no children, but not joints, ikHandles or effectors.
4. It pops up a scroll window that gives me a summary of what was done. If it looks like something necessary was deleted, then I'll reload the character and fix the code. So far, I haven't had this problem since the third iteration of the code.
5. It pops up a scroll window that gives me a list on top of joints that exist in the "gold standard" character that don't exist in the character that is being fixed. On the bottom, it gives me a list of joints in the character being fixed that don't exist in the "gold standard" character. Sometimes it's because the character being fixed has joints that the "gold standard" doesn't have like a tail and ears. Or some joints are named with joints that have their lettered incrementers jumping sequence because at one point intermediate joints were removed for redundancy.
But this all gives me a visual list to investigate. It alerts me to name formats that are out of conformity with the general naming convention. It points out joints that were never renamed from the default. It's a very good summary of things that might need to be looked at, and appropriately targeted.
6. It pops up another window with a final checklist for hierarchy conformity that also includes what objects need to have "inherit transforms" turned off.
When all this is done, it writes to a log file. I go and hand edit the log file with any additional steps I take with the lines of hand edited items indented, and finally, I add the file name that the newly fixed character was saved under.
With this, I was able to conform 16 of the 17 characters in under 4 hours (which only took that long because I was updating the code as I found problems, and wrote a new sg_rig utility which I'll need for a different stage of zeroing rotations later).
And then there's the new sg_rig utility. This pops up a summary of the rotation, rotation axis, joint orient and rotation order for specific joints I need to be certain conform to standards we need to meet. I borrowed some of the window code from the naming and hierarchy cleanup of the earlier utility script for that.
I wrote the utility because, while I had the characters up, I wanted to get a preview of the work I had ahead of me and to anticipate some upcoming problems I see with correcting them. I'll have my work cut out for me next week. I'm getting some ideas for maybe logging old data and correcting animation files being loaded from earlier work based on that old data (just in case dealing with this becomes my problem).
posted by Stephen Greenberg at 3:49 PM
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