Rivet (continues)

I finally did what I thought would be the final thing to do: I edited the pointOnMeshInfo.mll and included the calculation of tangentU. Although it uses 2 nodes, it doesn't works faster than Bazhutkin's version, I don't know why. So it is your choice.

Here you can downlaod the plug-in and mel scripts:

rivet_for_Maya7.0.zip

To make it faster, I have some ideas. The first thing could be done is to eliminate the need of an aimConstraint node by directly calculating the rotational values within the node itself. The second one could be calculating all the rivets' positions and rotations at once within a single node.

I thing I will give a break to this rivet problem, I'll work on this when we need this on our animation studio...

CGIndia

visit cgindia.blogspot.com daily, I do so... 

Rivet

Allright, now start with some real posts:

the recent two days I searched for a way to do the rivet thing using a method other than what Michael Bazhutkin used (www.geocities.com/bazhutkin). I found a way that use only 3 nodes where Bazhutkin's version use 5 nodes (including aimConstraint node), I wrote the script and it was working very well, but it was 2 times slower than Bazhutkin's version.

What I did was, I used two pointOnMeshInfo node which gives a position and normal vector, and an aimConstraint node. The first pointOnMeshInfo node calculates the position and normal the second one is just used for to get the position that aimConstraint will try to aim.

The problem is that if I used 2 pointOnMeshInfo nodes just to see how fast that they calculate, it is 2 times faster than Bazhutkin's, but the locator doesn't rotates of course, if I use 1 pointOnMeshInfo node and one aimConstraint node it is again 2 times faster, but the locator doesn't points the right point of course...

It gets slower when I try to use three of them. I will try to find a way to use only one pointOnMeshInfo and one aimConstraint nodes.