Simulation Toggle via Maya Display Layers

So this is a little workflow quicky about thinking outside of the box a bit. The goal is to easily create an on/off toggle for all the dynamic simulations in a scene while animating. What it should show is how things like display layers can be used for more then just display visibility.

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Growing Vines and Drawing Lines in Maya

In this four part video we'll cover the steps in creating a custom rig for a pose-able, shape-able growing vine or 3d stroke effect in Maya. We'll start by looking at how to use polyCube construction history in rigging and how the polySplitRing node can offer even more control in our setup later on. Also covered are using rendering nodes such as clamps, multiplyDivides, and conditions to further control our setup behind the scenes. The wire deformer will be the driving force behind posing the rig and we'll wrap up by creating controls with custom attributes and clean it all up into a logical hierarchy with sensible naming conventions.

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Rigging a ball with Cartoon Funtionality

In this four part video we discuss the process of making a squishy squashy bouncing ball rig. The topics cover adding deformers such as lattices and clusters with custom controls, attributes, and hierarchy. We go through using measuring tools to control deformation and break down the process of normalizing values to make our rigs scale properly. We also look at how to use the connection editor to make direct links between attributes from node to node. The techniques involved can be used for many rigging solutions beyond a simple bouncing ball.

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