Tuesday, April 7, 2009

paintItNow - a fast Color Overriding script

Hey Guys!

I haven't been posting here much since I've been working on my team project, besides that I've been away from my computer for a couple of days coming back to rest and peace with myself. I think it's just what I needed.

Well, ok. So what is paintItNow?
When you are rigging it's nice and cool if you color every controller curve so you as an animator can easily see which side did you select, and it just makes your rig way more easier to observe, see and use it. So, but what colors where? Well there's a standard, like left-hand side is blue, right-hand side is red. But I always somehow managed to 'forget' this. I myself than use yellow for center body parts and green for facial features. Which gives you an organized overall feeling of the rig.

So how can you color your curves, well that's possible with the color override (or by putting them in layers, but that has other disadvantages). But the problem with the color override is, you can't color override a whole selection. It's always just one at a time, which can take up some of your precious time. So checking the override checkbox, than assigning the color. Which is actually quite lame. THAT plus the fact that you always forget what to put where made me create this easy script with an interface which made you do this overrides on a selection as big as you wish.

The interface is as small as it can get and consists of the 4 colors as a button, and a grey button that you can use for easily removing any previously assigned color overrides.

Download the script here:
RN_paintItNow

Save the mel script, put it in your scripts folder. Rerun maya or just source the script and run it by running -> RN_paintItNow; <- as a command. And if you make it a shelf button it's even easier to use.

Hope somebody can use this.

Your sincere writer,
- Roy

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