Building¶
You are the rigger. This section is how a picker gets made, and how to make one that survives being used every day by somebody who did not build it.
The order to do it in¶
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Get the shapes down
Blocking, not finishing. Draw freehand, generate one item per control, or trace the artwork — then stop and look at it.
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Bind them
Point each shape at its controls. Do this early — an unbound picker looks finished and is useless.
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Arrange
Transform, align, mirror, snap. The half of the work that decides whether people enjoy using it.
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Make it readable
Colour, layers, background art, grouping frames. This is what turns two hundred grey squares into something a person can read at a glance.
Colour · Picker Outliner · Layers · Widgets · Images · Mute shapes
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Hand it over
Save it into the rig or export a package, and check it on somebody else's shot before you call it done.
Everything in this section¶
| Page | Covers |
|---|---|
| Edit mode | The mode itself, the tool strip, canvas size, undo |
| Creating items | Every way to get an item onto the canvas |
| Binding controls | Attaching Maya objects, and the Picker Behavior dialog |
| Drawing shapes | Freehand, the pen tool, vertices, rounded corners, holes |
| Shape library | The 77 presets, and saving your own |
| Arranging the layout | Gizmos, snapping, align, nudge, duplicate, toolbar menus |
| Mirroring | Duplicate + mirror, live mirror, shape symmetry |
| Sculpting in Maya | Convert items to meshes and back |
| Colour | The colour picker, Maya index colours, palettes |
| Picker Outliner | Layers, hierarchy, ordering, visibility |
| Layers and layer transforms | Ctrl+G, moving a whole layer around one pivot |
| Tabs, panels and grids | Structuring a picker bigger than one page |
| Images and backgrounds | Model sheets, the character portrait, viewport captures |
| Generating items from art | Image to Picker, Vector to Picker |
| Mute shapes | Decorative frames that group without selecting |
| Channel Box | Numeric editing of items |
| Widgets | Sliders, dials, switches, 2D sliders, notes and backdrops |
| Attribute control | Sliders, toggles and enums |
| Saving and sharing | Data nodes, .ampkr files, handing it to the team |
Five things worth knowing before you start¶
Bind as you go. It is tempting to draw the whole layout and bind at the end. Do not — Ctrl+Shift+A gives you bound items from the start, and binding a hundred anonymous squares afterwards is a bad evening.
Build it at the size it will be used. The canvas size is the window size. A picker designed on a 4K monitor and used at 1080p beside a viewport is a picker nobody uses.
Namespaces are handled for you. Bind to kamal:L_hand_ctrl and the picker
stores L_hand_ctrl. Do not try to strip namespaces yourself.
Why.
Layers before you need them. Retro-fitting layers onto four hundred finished items is far worse than making three layers at the start.
Test it as an animator. Switch to Anim mode, open somebody else's shot, and use it for ten minutes. Everything wrong with a picker shows up in the first ten minutes of real use and never in Edit mode.