2021.12.15

Minor maintenance release.

• FIXED Unselectable Viewport Icons Happened from time to time
• FIXED Clean Channel Box An option to clean or not to clean
• FIXED Legacy Viewport A rare case of unselectable widgets in the Manipulator UI.
• FIXED Overlap Group for non Grouped Markers Markers not part of a group would have trouble respecting its overlap group
• FIXED Z-up The ground was tweaked, and with it Z-up lost support
• FIXED Double HUD The manipulator could overlap Maya's native HUD, but no more
• ADDED Fine-grained control over unconvenitional orientations

Showcase

As is tradition, we must start with candy. Now, it's only been 3 days so all I have for you today is this amazing piece of animation here. 😅

Wyvern 2

Follow-up to the WIP from last release from The Wizard, a.k.a. Jason Snyman.

• See on LinkedIn

Wasp

Here's a response to a question on LinkedIn about whether or not you can use Ragdoll to make animation cycles. So here are 3 parts.

1. The finished cycle
2. The input animation
3. The default simulation, before cycling it

Total time spent 1h, including rigging and skinning. The model is a default Maya model from the Content Browser.

Clean Channel Box

With the manipulator in the last release, the Channel Box saw a huge spring cleaning.

Before	After

It was, however, a little too aggressive. Some of the attributes were still useful, especially for making sweeping changes across lots of markers at once. So in this release, you know have the option of:

1. Having these attributes visible on Assign via the Option Dialog
2. Toggling these attributes on/off via Ragdoll -> Utilities -> Toggle Marker Attributes

Legacy Viewport

More specifically, the environment variable MAYA_ENABLE_VP2_PLUGIN_LOCATOR_LEGACY_DRAW, is still in use in some studios. This variable would cause the Manipulator UI to be unselectable.

This has now been fixed.

Collision Group

Lone markers, like boxes and other environment assets and props have an Overlap Group like any other. But unless they are also part of a group, they would sometimes not respect the Overlap Group, requiring a scene re-open in order to take effect.

This has now been fixed.

Z-up

The default ground now correctly fits the grid even in a Z-up Maya scene.

Double HUD

The Manipulator HUD could sometimes fight with Maya's default HUD. Now it'll step aside temporarily until the manipulator is done.

Room to improve

It will temporarily toggle the Maya HUD on/off in the currently active viewport, based on the viewport your mouse is currently hovering. This can get finnicky sometimes. If it does, the option toggled is the one under Display -> HUD in the Maya viewport.

This will be improved in a future release.

Robust Viewport Icons

The viewport icons would sometimes be unselectable.

This was due to Maya being unable to provide Ragdoll with the correct "Active View", which Ragdoll uses to map your mouse to 3D. This has now been fixed, by no longer relying on the Active View.

Edit Constraint Frames

The previous release simplified limits by a lot, but there are still cases where the default orientation of some rig controls ends up in a funny situation.

Note

This does not matter to the simulation. It is only a rendering artefact.

To make this a little easier to work with, you can rotate the entire limit like this.

Note

You don't need the locators once you are done editing them, you should definitely delete them.

This will be made redundant in a future version as it gets much too technical and too easy to shoot yourself in the foot. If you make a mistake, delete the locators and call Reset Constraint Frames in the same menu to start again.