Brian Escribano

The Guest Book may soon be coming to an end. The last person to sign the Guest Book was from February 28, 2008! Almost two years since the last post and to honor the event February 28, 2010 will mark the deletion of the guest book unless I get 10 people to sign the Guest Book before midnight of the 28th. After all, I average 20 unique visitors a day to visit my site.

The spring semester is almost upon us at Glendale Community College where I will be teaching Character Rigging on Saturdays from 2-6:30 starting on February 20.

Need to fill my class with at least 15 students no later then the 11th so the class can continue. Registration ends on February 11 and late registration ends on the 20th.

Heading to part online format and lecture format using an Course Management System that will only be available through onsite at the GCC campus.

So, if you live in the area the class is very reasonable and should check it out.

Another Demo reel is in the works. All the menus and features was created using Python. Added some Python development using graphically interface for ease-in and east-out for weighting and more.

Here is a zip version of the file til I can get the browser not to automatically play the mov file. I am working on getting a better downloadable version. Download the 77M zip file here!

While you are waiting... A plugin-in that displaces a polygon's vertices in real time. Flash video can be found here!

I created a Facebook today to expand my creative network to keep in touch with people and find out about events in the Los Angeles area. There is just one thing that's keeping be for doing so. I have no idea on how to use Facebook??

Had a great time over at Nickelodeon but nothing lasts forever. I recently accepted an job offer with the Glendale Community College teaching Character Rigging this coming semester. Will be writing my own curriculum for the class in the coming weeks. The campus is beautiful and so easy to get lost. May have to use the GPS in my iPhone just to get around the first couple weeks. During my stay there I will continue to develop my skills, working on freelance projects and keeping my options open.

I accepted a new job working with Nickelodeon as a Character Rigger starting at the end of April. I will be working with an talented team of artist (few of them I taught myself) and exciting television projects for the network.

On April 10, I took my last steps out of the Computer Animation building at Full Sail where I been teaching Character Rigging and Scripting for the past 5 1/2 years. I had the pleasure with working with many passionate instructors dedicated to sharing knowledge and experience to their eager students. With that in mind "So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish".

Did not realize how much work it takes to move across the country, packing an entire house and dragging it in a small trailer. Will be making the long haul this Friday and looking to arrive in Burbank on the 21st. Returned emails will be hit or miss during that time... will be tired and a little bit cranky from the move.

Renames a sequence of nodes using a defined prefix, increment variable(INC), and suffix.
The INC can consists or numbers, lowercase letters or uppercase letters.

Benefits:
Nodes will be named correctly if the name already exist later in the selection.
For example given the nodes ['spam3','spam1', 'spam4', 'spam2'] parented under the world
to be named spam[1-4] will be named correctly without additional increments. Normally
the nodes will be named ['spam5', 'spam6', 'spam3', 'spam4']

Selection: nurbsSphere1, nurbsSphere2, nurbsSphere3, nurbsSphere4, nurbsSphere5
Python: cmds.renameSequence(prefix='mel_', alpha=True, suffix='_junky')
MEL: renameSequence -prefix "mel_" -alpha true -suffix "_junky";
Will rename the nodes to:
mel_a_junky, mel_b_junky, mel_c_junky, mel_d_junky, mel_e_junky, mel_f_junky

I finished another plug-in for Maya back in November that will displace a polygon's vertices in real time.  The plug-in moves the vertices in their normal direction based off a grey-scale 2D texture.

The node is based off  a  deformer which will allow a change in the set membership. During each frame, the active vertices in the set membership will have their UV coordinates queried based off a given UV Map. Then, using the color input of the displace Mesh Node, a color is retrieved that will be used to displace the vertices in their normal direction.

Currently the node only works with 2D textures, which does include image sequences. In the example video all the polygon meshes has a high density for a more accurate representation of the 2D texture. the example in the bottom right corner is 150 by 150 vertices.

Few of the presets were referencing a texture map causing an error when trying to use them. They have been fix and a new version is available. Also, I renamed the folders to "mia_material" and "mia_material_x".

Keep the comments coming.

Read the current discussion here!

Worked on a freelance project with DXD for the Tampa Bay Lightning's jumbotron. I did the character rig for all the characters. Technically, I did one rig and it was duplicated four more times for this shot. Finished the entire rig in a day and a half with very little sleep. The piece lasted about 15-20 seconds and was shown before the game started. Was a very exciting project to work on considering the Lightning is my favorite hockey team.

Turns out that my services were needed for unloading the truck. With the help of a moving crew hopped up on energy drink we was finished in 2 hours.

SIGGRAPH went well, I talked to many people and companies. Many a great ideas for future rigging ideas spawned from the many great talks, that I will be working on soon.

One of the most interesting things I saw was not on the convention floor, but was on the way the Seattle. A truck loaded with tomatoes caught fire. My attempts to snap a picture failed of the flame roasted tomatoes.

I will be attending SIGGRAPH this year representing the Orlando ACM SIGGRAPH this year in sunny LA. I am looking for work as a Character Technical Director. Contact me if you want to setup an interview or even just to hang out.

I will be staying with my brother in LA before I help him move to Seattle, so I will be touring the city on the 20th. Going to be a nice 18 hour drive, hopefully he does not ask me to help him unpack the truck.

-Brian

I wrote this class, while rigging two character simultaneously for my new reel. The rigs are very similar and the names of the nodes are the same. Felt that I was spending too much time renaming the nodes on the second character by referencing the first character's names. Tried copy/paste which did work but wasn't time saving. This class allow a selection of node names to be stored in a file and loaded in another instance of Maya with a search and replace feature.

#Character 1 old = crossRename() old.storeSelect() old.setPath('usd') old.write('tempSelect')

#Character 2 new = crossRename() new.storeSelect() new.setPath('usd') new.load('tempSelect') new.rename()

Any feature request please let me know. If you like the script please email me, sign the guestbook or leave comment

Download the crossRename here!

Was challenged two weeks to write a script that selects all odd or even CVs of a nurbs curve. Kind of a speed challenge, but was distracted during the writing of the script so what should of taken less then 10 minutes to write turned into 20 minutes.

#Created by Brian Escribano, www.meljunky.com import maya.cmds as cmds def curveOffset( ): selection = cmds.ls(selection=True) curve = selection[0].split('.')[0] selCV = selection[0][ selection[0].find('[')+1 : selection[0].find(']') ] numSpans = cmds.getAttr( curve + '.spans' ) degree = cmds.getAttr( curve + '.degree' ) form = cmds.getAttr( curve + '.form') numCVs = numSpans + degree; if ( form == 2 ): numCVs -= degree try: state = int(selCV) % 2 except: state = 0 selCV = numCVs + 1 if state == 0: selList = range(0, numCVs-1, 2) # evens else: selList = range(1, numCVs, 2) # odds for sel in selList: if sel != int(selCV): cmds.select( curve + '.cv[' + str(sel) + ']', toggle=True)