MEL Scripts: lowmanMirror.mel

In April of 2005, I gave a quick animation demonstration at the monthly meeting of A Bunch of Short Guys, and used the free LowMan character rig in my demo. I was animating a skip cycle, and during the part of the demonstration where I needed to create a mirrored version for one of the extreme poses, someone asked if Maya could do that automatically. I said that such a feature wasn't built into the program, but it could probably be scripted.

Well, that little side comment kept bubbling to the surface over the next couple weeks, so I finally sat down and hacked together a script that would mirror the pose of any LowMan rig. I learned a lot of new things about MEL scripting in the process, and while I probably won't use the script much myself, I figured someone out there might find some benefit from it. So here it is!

File

lowmanMirror.zip

This zip file contains:

• lowmanMirror.mel
• lowmanMirror.bmp - an icon for your shelf, designed to blend with the existing LowMan shelf icons

Credits

The whole script is my fault...er...responsibilty.

Usage

Put the script into your default Maya scripts directory. In the command line, enter:

source lowmanMirror.mel; lowmanMirror;

For the sake of convenience, I recommend making a shelf button from this line of code. An icon file is provided so you can add it to your existing LowMan shelf, and it'll look like one of the family.

Select one or more control objects in a LowMan rig, and run the script (manually via the command line, or via a shelf button). The character's current pose will be mirrored, including facial controls. A few special things to notice...

• You must have some part of the character rig selected before running the script. This functionality was added because...
• The script will detect if the selected component is embedded in the scene, or if it's from of a referenced file. This means that you can have multiple references of different LowMan rigs in the same scene file and the script will detect which one you wish to mirror based on what you've selected.
• This script works with all current variations of the LowMan 1.2 rig, including LowBatter and LowFatMan. Even though LowBatter has no face controls, the script will detect that and skip the appropriate operations.

Questions? Comments? Requests? Drop me a line!

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