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This is a little tool I wrote today to help speed up my animation workflow. Several of the iAnimate rigs have a very useful 'box' control for the hand with attributes like 'fist', 'curl' etc, that allows you to pose the entire hand in addition to the individual FK controllers for each knuckle. This can speed up blocking out the main poses and you can then customize the poses with the individual controllers on top of that. One issue I ran into though, is that when you get to the polishing stage it's a little confusing to work in the graph editor as the fingers are being controlled by two different things.
So, what my tool does is look at the current pose of the fingers, zero out the box controller attributes and then restore the pose so it looks identical, but is now being created solely by the FK controls. This makes it easier to polish the curves as you are only dealing with Rot X,Y,Z for each joint.
The tool will work with any of the iA rigs that are set up like this, currently that includes Dennis, Hero, Jane, Sheldon and Scarecrow.
Cast:Brian Horgan
Tags:iAnimate, Maya, MEL, animation, blocking, posing, polishing, hand, rig and fingers