jklind

Out of necessity

Added 2020-01-24 16:53:16 +0000 UTC

Sometimes I get really tired of needing to write my own tools out of necessity. Certain things should just be built into the app.

Maya's driven keys - using one object to drive animation on another - have been a feature from the start. The software is over 20 years old. In all that time, the developers haven't thought that perhaps artists will want an easy way to export and reload those keys, in case a rig changes, or if the artist wants to load them onto another rig?

There IS a built-in animation exporter, which works well for standard, non-driven animations. It even has an option to export driven keys! It just can't reload them. Even following the help docs to the letter, it doesn't work.

The reason this is all a big deal for me, is because I plan on using driven keys for Daisy's facial expressions, BUT without the ability to export those poses, her rig would need to be finalized first. Even when it is final, I'll still want the ability to load those poses onto mini-Rose and Monique.

Needing to write this tool made me angry, because this is a function that at this point should be built-in, and writing it took time that I would have rather spent on other things, especially since I now have a contract starting next week.

Anyway, this thing works, so now I need to spend the next couple days drawing, to take my mind off of it.