Joint Skeleton-mover Script

You can temporarily download it here until I get it on Creative Crash.
Or click Read More to show the full script at the bottom of the post.

This is a script I started late last year, and I've recently come back and cleaned it up.  It allows you to grab the root joint of a joint chain to rotate and move it relative to the origin.  It creates a locator on your joint, bakes the animation onto that, and then allows you to interact with a shape on the origin to play with your joint chain.  After deleting, it bakes it all back onto the root joint.  Though it's fairly simple, and not entirely original, it has been one of my most-used scripts for exported joint chains (and also mocap cleanup).

It's pretty straightforward; you run the JHH_skeletonMover script to create or delete the skeleton mover.  It will intelligently put it on the object selected, then delete it off when you're done.  There's also a JHH_skeletonMover_originOffset procedure which will center the joint onto the origin; good for zeroing out your animation.  I'll be making a video pretty soon, but feel free to ask if you have questions.

I'll probably rewrite this in Python at some point, just to get some practice in.

Epic Games Style Facial Rig

This was my experiments on the Epic Games style facial rig.  It essentially allows them to make one hero face, controlled with morph deformers (blendshapes), and then transfer the animation to a joint system on a series of different faces.  Joints are much cheaper to use in a game engine, and it is much easier on the animators to use a single system across all of the characters in the Gears of War game.

I edited the Nassa rig to have a mouth to test this out.  The left Nassa face is the hero using blendshapes.  The controllers drive that face, which in turn move locators parented to the verts on the face.  (I used a Maya rivet script to constrain the locators to verts.  Make sure your UV spaces are unique!)  Then those locators move the weighted joints on the character's face. The transfer wasn't exactly 1 to 1, but it was pretty close, and with more work, I'm sure it'd be closer.  With a higher-poly face, I'd need some more joints and a bit more time in weighting.  However, even these limited joints transfered to the high-poly Chip face pretty well, with minor editing on the joint weights.

(video coming soon, too)