2020.12.18
Documentation documentation documentation!
- ADDED Documentation You heard it here first!
- ADDED Help Page All menu items now offer a dedicated help page for details about how it works.
- ADDED Timeline More videos more easily accessible via the new Timeline feature of UIs
- CHANGED API 💖 cmds The API now integrates with
maya.cmds - ADDED Shelf Support Menu items can now be added to your own custom shelf with
Ctrl + Shift + Click - ADDED Helper warnings Ragdoll now warns when doing something unsupported
This version expires January 10 2021
Documentation
Since the last release I've added a boatload of documentation to Ragdoll, including the very website you are visiting now!
This is where I'll aggregate anything there is to know about Ragdoll, including links to the upcoming forums and chat rooms, YouTube series and more. More more more!
Documentation is generated dynamically from the same source used to generate the in-Maya menu and graphical dialogs, so whenever you want quick help from within Maya without breaking your flow, you can! And when you're on the train without access to Maya wanting to know more about a particular button or feature, you can!
Help Page
Every menu item now comes with the Help sub-menu active.
The page can also be accessed by clicking on the top description.
I also added hints to the labels of attributes, rather than just the widgets themselves.
All of the information is generated from the same source as the website, so they'll tell you the same thing except closer to where you are.
For example, the Active Rigid menu item:
Timeline
Multiple videos are now visible in the UI, to shed more light onto how things work.
Hints
Hovering over the currently playing video displays a description of what it is about.
Real-time scrubbing
I've added real-time scrubbing too!
The caveat however is that it consumes a lot of RAM, this dialog of about 1,000 frames takes 1.5 GB of RAM, and a hefty delay to showing the option dialog.
API and cmds
The API used to take and return instances of cmdx, the high-performance alternative to PyMEL. The API now integrates seamlessly with maya.cmds, both taking and returning node paths (i.e. strings) rather than instances, which means you can now do this!
from maya import cmds
from ragdoll import api as rd
cube, _ = cmds.polyCube()
cmds.move(0, 10, 0)
cmds.rotate(35, 50, 30)
scene = rd.createScene()
rigid = rd.createRigid(cube, scene)
cmds.evalDeferred(cmds.play)
The performance advantage of cmdx is still intact, and can be accessed via commands.py which contains identical members and argument signatures, except returning instanced of cmdx instead. This is what's used internally for both performance and readability.
In addition, there is now support for interactive.py for quick-and-dirty one-off scripts. This module contains all of what is provided by the Ragdoll menu and work similarly to api.py except they take (1) user selection and (2) user preferences into account.
Add to Shelf
Menu items can now be added to the shelf by holding Ctrl + Shift + Click. Menu items also reveal the equivalent Python command to use for your scripts!
Helper Warnings
If nodes have custom pivots or if your Maya scene is set to DG evaluation mode, Ragdoll will tell you about why that's a bad idea.
