Mothman - incredible portfolio/rigs/guy

Every so often you come across a portfolio website that absolutely blows your mind, and this is one of them:

 https://www.mothman-td.com/

The website is so slick and professional, and the actual work is of extremely high quality, check it out!

Morgan Loomis - Anim & Rig Tools

 I came across a pretty cool new zealander who is hosting a lot of his tools on his own personal website. Thought it was worth a link :) 

http://morganloomis.com/tools/

Kuadro – Reference Image Tool

So here’s a cool little tool for helping organise reference images on screen – Kuadro. You can open up any image files and arrange them on screen without all of the messy borders/tools that the default image displayers use. Really handy for modelling rigging or animation. You can also save your organised layout for next time you resume working. A great little free software package! 

Download it here: http://kruelgames.com/tools/kuadro/

Python3 comparison operators

Meditate on this 🙏

'foo' is 'foo'
True

'foo' == 'foo'
True

'foo' is 'foo2'[:-1]
False

'foo' == 'foo2'[:-1]
True

'foo' is 'Foo'.lower()
False

'foo' == 'Foo'.lower()
True

0 == 0.0
True

0 is 0.0
False

0 is False
False

0 == False
True

not 0
True

Thanks to Joe Hornsby for providing these excellent examples.

Free, Opensource Animation Picker - Dreamwall

So, "it ain't 2005 anymore", and quite rightly so. 

Why spend time creating a bespoke tool, if there's something out there already that's free, great, and gets the job done?

Dreamwall Anim Picker is a free and intuitive tool that allows the construction of an animation picker for rigs within Maya. It's really good, and I think it will save you a lot of time, check it out here:

 https://github.com/DreamWall-Animation/dwpicker

Can't undo in Maya

The Issue:

// Error: line 1: The undo queue is turned off.

:(

The Fix:

In script editor, on a python tab, run:

cmds.undoInfo(state=True)

:)

Cool Maya Time Slider Preference!

 I discovered a new time slider preference today that blew my mind slightly;

'Snap to whole frames'.

When you turn this off, as you scrub through the time slider you are able to see how your frames interpolate from one, to the other. Particularly useful if you're trying to debug euler/gimbal issues!

Prune weights not working

The Issue:

Hey! My prune weights aren't working! :(

The Fix:

Yeah? Have you tried unlocking your weights?