PROCEDURAL MODULES

Building a rig from modules does give a lot of flexibility but it’s still limited if modules are fixed assets that you cannot change. Most common adjustments that you would like to make to biped or quadruped rig for example are probably number of joints in the spine and tail or number of roll joints in limbs. But the possibilities can go much further than that.

This brings me to a sneak peek at the ACS3 feature that I’m personally very excited with - procedural modules. Procedural module is an asset combined with Python code that implements its custom functionality. The code exposes a set of custom properties and commands through which user can modify/adjust/generate module contents. These properties show up in module’s item properties tab automatically.

Today I’m presenting you a video in which I show how a basic Forward Kinematics Chain procedural module is used to rig Fox character tail and ears. This module allows for setting number of segments in the FK chain dynamically. In this example I used 4 segments for the tail and only 2 for ears.

This is really a first look at this feature and a basic use case - there are still quite a few things to work out. Eventually though, I think this will be very powerful functionality. In addition to making ACS3 a much more flexible system it will also help with keeping assets efficient. Rather then hard-building all the different options into the rig asset (like it is done in ACS2) custom properties can be used to tailor rigging assets to a particular character and a specific use case. This should help with keeping ACS3 rigs leaner and hopefully slightly faster as well.

The video features Fox asset created by Gaetano Fornarelli.

At the same time this post concludes ACS3 development in 2019. This year has been a lot of hard work to bring ACS3 to its current state but there’s still a lot more work to be done to get it ready for release. Wish me luck in 2020 ;).