Assembling spider rig

It’s been a lot of hard work on bringing various parts of ACS3 codebase together during past 2 months or so: redesigning, refactoring and optimising. I also spent considerable amount of time on UI design which involved laying various parts of interface out and doing initial pass on icons. UI layout gave me lots of troubles especially as ACS3 toolset will be much larger then ACS2 one and I had to redesign it from scratch. I may actually do a separate post with my thoughts on UI design…

Today I have a quick overview video for you that shows the process of assembling spider rig from 2 modules: hub and a spider leg. After the rig is put together it is saved as new rig preset which can then be dropped into other scenes (also shown on video). The Save Rig feature allows you to save out your rig as new preset at any time and the saved asset will include all the meshes (bind meshes, rigid meshes, proxies) as well. This way you can save not only bare rigs but entire rigged characters too.

The video also shows dropping guide and poses presets onto the rig - features that are reimplementations of similar functionality that is present in ACS2 already.

Note that the video playback speed is between 2 and 3 times faster then realtime and there is no audio.

In subsequent post(s) I plan to cover the process of converting vanilla MODO spider leg rig into proper ACS3 module that is visible in today’s video. I think it will be a good example to show why you can think about ACS3 as a rigging platform that can be used to build all kinds of rigs (eventually).