Liz's Scripting for Animation and VFX Homework Blog

 Final: Auto 3 point lighting set up The idea: This final assignment was pretty free form. I had a couple ideas that I wanted to explore, but I ended up wanting to make an automatic three point lighting set up. When showing off a model one of the most common lighting set ups is a three point one. I thought this would be something that could be useful in quickly setting up some lighting that could be customized.  The process: I ended up using chatgpt as a tool for this assignment. It offered interesting starting places.  Notes: I first tried to use the position of the camera to auto update the locations of the lights, i wanted them to rotate around the subject with the camera. I was thinking of using expressions with mel or using condition nodes, however I ended up not going down that route and the lights would be set up around the subject once and could be set up again by running the script again.  I used the xform function to get the position of the subject, I used ...

 Rigging Assignment Set up for IK FK switch and automatic script that adds controllers to a skeleton and orient constrains the joints I originally wanted to make a script that automatically set up the entire IK FK switch but I ran out of time.  import maya.cmds as cmds import string def find_and_rename_joints(bodyPart, side, num_joints): # "arm", "leg", etc., "Lf" or "Rt"     letters = list(string.ascii_uppercase)          joints = []     childJoints = []          joints.append(cmds.ls(sl=1) [0])          childJoints = cmds.listRelatives(ad=1, type="joint")     childJoints.reverse()          for i in range(num_joints - 1):         joints.append(childJoints[i])          armJoints = []          for i,joint in enumerate(join...

 Stretchy Arm Automating Script For this assignment I followed the tutorial on how to manually set up this stretchy arm and then I followed the tips to get started video. The second video walks through setting up the joints into groups so that you can more easily work with the three joints of the arm.  The video also goes through a script on how to rename the joints.  Functions  find_and_rename_joints() import maya.cmds as cmds import string def find_and_rename_joints(bodyPart, side): # "arm", "leg", etc., "Lf" or "Rt"     letters = list(string.ascii_uppercase)          joints = []     childJoints = []          joints.append(cmds.ls(sl=1) [0])          childJoints = cmds.listRelatives(ad=1, type="joint")     childJoints.reverse()          for i in range(2):         joint...