studioNEST Melena & Brigks

[Hirazi Blue]

studioNest has just released two free addons, "Melena" & "brigks":

studioNEST's Melena is a hair styling and simulation framework based on the Autodesk Softimage ICE platform. Its toolset features various hair generation tools, effects as well as custom simulation nodes and forces. By supporting lattices for styling as well as for simulation Melena enables artists to create directable simulations. Melena has been used in production for creating the stylized hair for the No Pets Allowed project that we are working on, and is now released under GPL for download.

studioNEST's brigks is a rigging toolset, that contains a collection of solvers for Autodesk Softimage. Furthermore brigks comes with an autoweighting tool which helps to improve the daily workflow.

Get them both here ;)

[redmotion]

Cool!

Just in time for the CAP!

It'd be nice to make use of some custom production tools on it.

[Hirazi Blue]

"Brigks" does appear to be basically an update of the Sixbird Rigging Solvers. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing!!!
Both "Brigks" and the Sixbird Rigging Solvers even seem to share one Toolbar GUID... ;)

[opentarget]

ye cool addons!
like redmotion said just in time for the CAP.

[ace63]

Now all we need is the documentation
I had a first look and so far it seems like a very nice toolkit, I just don't know how to use it properly

[Hirazi Blue]

Update:
for "Melena" a sample project has been added,
for "Brigks" documentation and a sample project ("Including the Free Biped Brigks Based Rig") have been added...

Downloadable at the url specified in the first post of this thread...
Enjoy...

[dwigfor]

Finally downloaded these and ran into a small problem when installing/running BrigKS. When inspecting the toolbar, they all said 'Missing". I noticed it required Python 2.x. Low and behold, I didn't have Python listed in 2011 SP1. Very strange; I thought it came installed with SI 2011. Even tried downloading Active Python and that didn't work either. But then I saw a blogpost from Stephen when I went to download his RCTools 2011 64bit compile.. http://xsisupport.wordpress.com/2010/06 ... tall-2011/
Long story short, if you install 2011 SP1 and then uninstall earlier versions of Softimage, you must run Command Prompt (Run as Admin) and run runonce.bat in order to make Python available inside of SI. After doing that, it all works great.

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On another note. Do you need to Cache the spring simulation? I discovered that last minute with Tail when doing my last shot with Softimage for Diego. Has anyone encountered any problems with Brigks that I should know of before using it?

Thx
-Dave

[pBarrelas]

Thanks for sharing your experience with the rest of us! Now we know what to do if we get stuck under similar circumstances!

[Jho]

Brigs seems like exactly what I was looking for. I'm trying to rig a snake and want to put nulls on a spline and slide them there so that they maintain their distance.

But I can't figure out how to use this tool.
I got it installed but when I select the nulls and the curve and hit Null 2 Curve, it just creates a new null that doesn't do anything.
Also, there was no example for Null 2 Curve in the project files.

EDIT:
Sorry about that, I guess it's just that it has to be a linear curve. I tried to use spiral and arc.
Finally found a tutorial video for this: https://vimeo.com/12377832