05 ‐ Controllers
In the Controllers tab, we have all we need to create or edit controller shapes.
Doc5: Controller tab
We can choose the controller shapes' color using this panel.
- Index: click on the color button to apply a color override in the selected shapes. Maya works with color indexes (the button numbers label). Select 0 (zero) to remove the applied color.
- RGB: we can choose the color using the RGB panel. Click on the remove button to reset the color to its original color.
- Outliner: set the text color in the outliner of the selected nodes.
This panel is designed to work with user-defined (extra) attribute default values. We can use these 3 buttons to edit them:
- Reset: reset the attribute values to their default values.
- Set: set the attribute default value as the current value for the selected nodes.
- Editor: it opens a window to check and set the default values for the selected controllers. We can edit the Default fields to set the default values as needed.
In this section, we can create new controllers, add shapes to the selected controllers, or replace the current shapes with the chosen shape using the predefined controller curve shapes:
We also have options for the degree (linear or cubic), the size, and the curve directions.
The script takes the first selection as the source and the other selections as destinations, applying the command to all selected controllers. These are the buttons we can use to edit the selected controllers:
- Add shapes: it uses the source shape (first selected node) to add the same shape to the destination without changing the source node.
- Copy shapes: it changes the destination shapes to the new one, removing the old shapes, but doesn't change the source node (first selected node).
- Replace shapes: it applies the source shapes to the destination, replacing the current shapes, and deleting the source node (first selected node). It's handy to replace the Option_Ctrl shape.
- Reset curve: it resets the current selected node to its original shape.
- Change curve degree: it'll check the current controller shape degree and change to another option we have in this script (Linear <-> Cubic).
- Zero out group: creates a zero out group for the selected node. It means a new father transform for the item.
- Select all controls: just a command to select all the controllers created by this script in the scene.
We have 3 main actions to do in this section about the calibration:
- Transfer: it will get the calibration attributes from the source node (first selection) and set them in the destination nodes (second selection and beyond) if they have the same calibration attributes.
- Import: the script will reference a rig file to import the calibration attribute values from it. We need to choose the desired rig file in the folder. The reference will be removed after the import finishes.
- Mirror: we can mirror the calibration of the selected nodes (or all if anything is selected) using this mirror button. Usually, we set the calibration for the left side controllers first, because the UI is configured to find the mirror based on the naming convention of these prefixes:
- from: L_ (left)
- to: R_ (right)
Similar to the calibration section, we have 3 main actions to do in this section about the controller shape mirror:
- Export: choose the folder where we want to export the selected controllers' shapes.
- Import: find the folder where we stored the exported controllers' shapes that we want to import into the current rig.
- Mirror: there's a UI element to define the axis we want to apply the mirror shape (X by default). Usually, we edit the shapes of the left side first, then we can mirror them to the right side, as expected by the naming convention, in the same way we have for the calibration prefixes:
- from: L_ (left)
- to: R_ (right)