Hello community! I've been lurking around for a while now and decided it was time I contributed a little.

At the request of some of my colleagues, I started a blog where I will write tools for animators and detail my thought process while doing it. I intend to put up a new tool each week (or at least try to, depending on my schedule). So far I have posted 3 simple tools in posts detailing how I approached each of them. If you don't want to know how to write them yourselves and just want the scripts, there is a download section where the tools can be grabbed without suffering through my jibber-jabber. Some tools will be pure scripts, some plugins, some ICE compounds, special views, etc.

Tools available right now:
1. Keep Ref keys (tool that cleans up the timeline of an object based on a second "reference" object)
2. Change Interpolation (switches the FCurves of the selected object to spline, constant, or linear)
3. Match All Transforms (the softimage built-in tool is buggy when working with keyed rotations, this one isn't)
4. Point Tracker (this tool creates nulls constrained on every selected vertex through an ICETree)
5. Copy Animation (this tool simplifies the copy/paste animation workflow)

I know that what is available right now is pretty basic and simple, don't worry, I'm just going through the simple ones first so I can get a hang of writing a post each week. I also need to figure out the proper approach to explaining them which is why they might not follow the same "pattern" just yet.

I have a couple of ideas for what will come next including some fun scripting/ICE combos but I am also open to suggestions and requests.

Blog: http://philmelancon.wordpress.com/
Direct link to the download section: http://philmelancon.wordpress.com/downloads/

Feel free to drop me a line if you have an idea for more animation tools or even a suggestion for the way I present them, I don't plan on stopping anytime soon and I do like a challenge once in a while!

That's a very nice & valuable blog you've started... Keep it up

A new tool is (semi) available! This one will be done in 2 parts, one for the ICE compound and one for the script to automate it. Like the previous tools everything is detailed, I did some animated gifs for some of the steps for those who aren't too familiar with ICE. Again I went for something really simple. This tool is basically a vertex constraint. It takes whatever object you apply this compound to and glues it to a vertex on a specified geometry (similar to Object to Cluster).

Compound: http://bit.ly/zr2H6q
Detailed process: http://philmelancon.wordpress.com/2012/02/04/pointtracker-part-1/

The script will be up next week.

Cheers!

Thank you! Useful stuff so far, looking forward to what you're gonna do.

The 2nd part of the pointTracker is now available! This script assumes that you have the compound from the download page of my website, if you built your own, named it differently, have different names for input ports, or if it's not located in your User Compounds folder, you will need to modify the script accordingly. Feel free to ask me what you need to change if you can't figure it out by yourself.

I also added a new feature to this script based on a suggestion from one of my colleagues and will eventually add that feature to all the existing scripts and the ones to come. If you press Alt while clicking the script's button, a pop-up menu giving you some information about the tool will appear. I'll have this as a standard for all of my future tools.

Download the script directly here: http://bit.ly/w0mDmI
See how it was written here: http://philmelancon.wordpress.com/2012/02/12/pointtracker-part-2/


I'm thinking of either a tool that mimics maya's tear off viewport functionality or a plugin to clean up FCurves by deleting unnecessary keys.
Feel free to suggest anything else if you have better ideas
Cheers!

Thanks, Philo, much appreciated your new tools. There is a maya plugins which name is tradigiTOOLS that has a lot of tools, in case you want to checkit this is the web http://funhouseinteractive.biz/tradigitools.html

Hi, I can´t download anithing from your web, it seems that is broken or something. Thanks

Works fine on my side, did you try to right-click/save as the links?

Thanks for that link btw, I'll have a look and see if there's something that catches my eye!

Alright, I've updated all the download links from my blog so that they point to a dropbox public folder. Let me know if you're still having problems.

I've added a new tool today. It's a script that simplifies the copy/paste animation workflow a bit.
http://philmelancon.wordpress.com/2012/02/25/copy-animation/

As usual, the full script can be dowloaded from the download page (see first post for the link)

I also posted something last week that wasn't really a tool but that explained a bit about how I approach combining scripting and ICE. If you're interested, you can read about it here:
http://philmelancon.wordpress.com/2012/02/22/ice-and-scripting/

Hi Phil,

that copy/paste script reminds me of something that I've always wanted in SI. A bit different but a variation on it: simplified copy-paste keyfunctions in the timeline. So, selecting keyframe(s) and then hitting ctrl-c/x, going to other timeline position and hitting ctrl-v.

It's actually like having dopesheet abilities in the timeline, it speeds up the workflow a lot IMO.

For single keyframes you could even speed this up a whole lot more - just hovering over the timeline with the pointer would be enough to tell SI it's keyframe at current frame you want to handle. So ctrl-x cuts current keyframe, as long as timeline is area of interest.

Does SI recognize area of interest?