Lock Points Position

[myara]

I just wrote an script to lock points and I though it may be useful for some of you.

It's based on a friend (ymt3d) Ice Tree, who made that ICE based on a crappy script I wrote
I just wrote his version to make it automatic. And it is way faster than the script I wrote, and don't want to use anymore.

https://dc685.4shared.com/download/1hnF ... intsICE.py


Lock points:
select your points, and run.
It will create a point cluster with the selected points and lock the position of the points that are in that cluster.

Unlock:
Select your object and run.
It will freeze the ice tree and delete the cluster.
Warning : Since it freezes the ICE tree, everything under it will be gone.

How to install it:
It's a script. Run it from your script editor, or better, create a button in a shelf or toolbar.

Since it is Python, you'll need Python to be installed.
It's only been tested in SI 2012, but newer SI should be ok.
2010, I'm not sure.

[EricTRocks]

You can do this without using a custom script... select points, create cluster with center. Unparent the new null from the mesh. In the cluster center op, animate the "Mute" parameter to lock / unlock points. Is this the same or did I miss something with your setup?

[myara]

That's different, that would keep your points position only when you move the object, not when you actually try to move the points or when you have Proportional activated and are moving points very close to them.

My problem was that I had a rigged character with a helmet on it. It is a game character with everything merged, one mesh, and I had to change the helmet modeling without changing the character body. In Maya you can lock points, but I don't think we have that in SI.

This was my best solution without having to extract polygons, copy weights, reasign materials, etc, etc.

What this script does is to "lock" the points position by moving them to their old position with two ICE trees.

My previous crappy script was with an scripted operator and a dummy object. That saved me a lot of time when I was working with very low poly models in an RPG game with a lot of exchangeable parts, but it is very slow with high poly objects so I changed it to this ICE version which works pretty good so far.

Something like this, this is a video from my first experiments about a year ago. The performance is even worst than the "final" scripted operator version, and much worst than this ICE version, but the idea is the same.