I just polished up a longstanding todo item from animators: Make the controls easier to distinguish/select.

A bit of history: My old blender rigs used controls that spanned each finger, that scaled up or down to curl it, and rotated to rotate it. I used IK, which meant the tip of the control always aligned with the tip of the finger- but it had limited reverse-curl, and no tweaks. For Big Buck Bunny, Nathan Vegdahl took the idea, but changed the implementation to action-constraints, solving both problems but creating another ( controls no longer align with the fingers – hard to select). I’ve taken that same setup for Gilga, and animators instantly complained about the difficult selection.
My solution was to color each finger uniquely (duh!) and to make the controls themselves deform matching the fingers, that way, they stay completely aligned with them. Short Demo video below:

BREAKING NEWS! Chris Monson and teldredge posted working versions!( bdancer also, but the link didn’t work ) Thanks to all of you, send me your name as you would like it to appear in credits. Thanks to everyone else with help and suggestions.

Hey folks. a while back Josh Wedlake wrote a script for autowalking, which we would need to put together crowd scenes of cockroaches in the subway. The time has come where we’re actually doing the animation parts, but unfortunately, massive changes to the API have rendered the script non-functional. Josh is currently deep into his graduation animation project, and I’m swamped with many tasks, rendering the time for understanding and fixing the script out of my reach for the moment.
Tal came up with the idea of putting out a public call instead of a in-list internal one, since the script is pretty self-contained. Most of the incompatibilities stem from changes to mathutils. I’ve made a stab at fixing things, but there’s a lot left, and it’s possible I’ve done the wrong thing, since I don’t fully understand his code 😉 so script still doesn’t work. If you’re game download the .blend and give it a go! as a bonus, you’ll get a (mostly) walking (get it?) autowalker, and your name in the credits. Download here.

Protected layers are a rig features I had only a vague understanding for a while. Thanks to a bug, and a fix from Ton (and his explanation) I have a somewhat better understanding, I’ll put down here, mainly so I don’t forget. First of all, this is what they look like in 2.5x (left) and 2.4x (right):

So far so good. But clicking these won’t actually change anything in the file you’re working in. Once you link he rig as a group and create a proxy*, things will become more clear.
With a proxy, you have a linked group with a localish rig proxy you can pose. Protected layers control what happen to the local proxy on file load:

• Unprotected layers are local. The bones here are now out-of-sync with the rig file, you can add bones, delete them, add constraints, remove them, etc. If you change the rig file on these layers, nothing happens to your scene file
• Protected layers get synced with the rig. any changes to the rig (new bones, constraints, etc.) will propagate to the scene file everytime you load the file. You won’t be able to add bones, delete them, or delete constraints in the scene file

The design allows users to pose bones in protected layers, since ‘pose’ is actually a separate data structure that lives ‘on top’ of ‘bone’ data. Interestingly enough you can even add new constraints (part of the pose) but cannot delete original ones. The only catch is, that any un-keyed poses get wiped out when the rig is synced on file load- so you *must* key every bone you want to keep the pose on.

In Blender 2.58 there’s a bug that prevents posing bones in protected layers. This has been fixed for 2.59, coming soon. This bug is actually the reason I had to find out about all of this, since it cost me many hours, as my rig changes wouldn’t propagate to scene files, meaning I had to delete and then manual spend time fixing constraints, converting curves, keying channels, re-adding missing stuff, every time I updated the rig. Basically < record (constraints/parenting/anything unexpected) , protect, save, load, save, unprotect, re-add the recorded, save> cycle to do on each scene file everytime I wanted to push a rig update. To make things worse, most of our animators are overseas, and many of them don’t use SVN, so the process has been quite painful. I’ll continue to do this until all animators are using the new version, after which I can protect the layers and fix everything up.

Note: if you add a constraint to a bone in an unprotected layer, and later on protect that layer, you will lose that constraint!! since the bone is unprotected, it is local, and once the layer has been protected, gets wiped out by the (identical) protected bone. After this, of course, you can readd the constraint to the protected bone and it will ‘stick’.
* making a proxy:

• In the rig file, create a group that contains the mesh, armature and all other components of your character, optionally only including layers that contain renderable items in the group Dupli layers.
• save the rig file and open a new one
• file->link->browse to the rig file and then link the group
• ctrl-alt-p and select the armature from your rig to create a posing proxy

There’s a remote, but non zero chance, that we’ll be able to pull off other denizens of the subway for certain shots in the movie. Thinking about design got me wanting *not* to have other characters with ‘gilgaportions’ but maybe populating the world with stylised characters that have their own uniqueness and could fit into her world. My first little attempt is drawing some basic silhouettes next to hers: