Building Reusable Lighting Rig

I mentioned numerous times that ACS3 is meant to be rigging platform, not a fixed solution. The goal is to allow for developing all kinds of rigs, not only creatures. Today I want to show a little bit more of the ACS3 internals by demonstrating how to build a very simple custom rig that can be used to light a scene. This is rather unorthodox example but I think it shows what ACS3 will be able to do without diving into complexities of typical rigging.

Still, the video is longer than usual (almost 14 minutes). I start from showing how to convert an existing setup (rigged spot light) into custom ACS3 module, then use this module to build a custom lights setup rig (with just 2 lights for simplicity). Finally, I show how the rig works in practice by quickly lighting an example mesh. The fact that the lights setup is built as ACS3 rig makes it possible to use ACS3 poses and actions library on it. The final part of the video demonstrates how quickly you can try different lighting variations using a few pre-made poses.

I hope that this will give you a better idea on where I go with ACS3 and possibly why it requires so much development time. As you can see most of the time so far has been spent on designing and developing framework that will hopefully provide MODO with a robust and flexible rigging solution that’s not tied to any specific type of rigging. That’s the long term goal at least.