Dipping into Scripting

Over the past week and a half I've been slapping together a script for personal use for a games project I'm currently working on. The breif calls for around 8 fully rigged bipedal characters completed within the next few months. Thankfully none of them are full on, only basic functionality needs to be implemented. No facial rigging necessary, although one or two might need one so they can be posed for promotional images. I could have jumped onto CreativeCrash and used one of the many fantastic auto-rigging scripts found on there, or used Maya's built in Human IK system and be over and done with this in a day, but I guess I didn't want to 'cheat' myself when theres so much to learn from doing it yourself. I've had some background using c# during the course of university, and thought this would be the perfect excuse to actually put some of it to use. So I decided to start simple, and just completed my first significant MEL script that automates the process of setting up and rigging arm and leg chains. After rigging the first two characters for this project it became immediately obvious that spending anymore time repeating these steps would be a waste of time, so set out to automate it. I found 'The Art of Rigging: Volume 1' by CG Toolkit  provided a good spring-board to get started, but once I'd written the first couple of procedures the rest came naturally. The script is by no means elegant, but it gets what I need done in a fraction of the time.

Next up, I think it might be good to work out how to automatically create a IK/FK stretchy spine setup, or how to generate a series of FK controls along a joint chain of any length, like in jbuck's neat script "The Rigging Toolbox." (www.creativecrash.com/maya/script/the-rigging-toolbox) Not because I'm too cheap to buy it, but to learn how it's done. At least thats how I justify myself.

You can download my script, "autoLimbRigger" for free from CreativeCrash at:
www.creativecrash.com/maya/script/autolimbrigger