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Hi guys,

I'm enjoying the discussion regarding Fabric and the cross-DCC rigging project. I didn't want to hi-jack the thread so started this one. Apologies if it's redundant.

I've been involved in building several rigging systems. So, much so that I co-founded Zoogloo with Andy Buecker in 2006 to rig for studios. We worked on 25 different projects over a three year period including, Spiderman3, Where The Wild Things Are, Happy Feet, Thundercats and more. Because we worked on animated features, episodic television, games and visual effects features and in Maya and in Softimage, we developed an in-house rigging system that took a different approach to any rigging system at the time and any that I have seen since.

Having worked at ILM and witnessed the size of the team that had to be hired to translate between maya and ILM's proprietary tools, we decided to go further up the chain and develop a higher level rigging tool. We would not translate between softwares, we would instead issue each package instructions that would be built natively.

i.e. a node based editor to build connections between blocks of body parts. A block would have characteristics built in, a 3-bone spine, or a 9-boneIKFK spine or a Disney-foot or an ILM-head. Each block then passed their data to a python script built for maya or softimage natively. i.e. we had to write Disney-foot in python for Maya and python for Softimage.

btw. You can tell from my poor explanation above which one of us did the majority of the coding! (thanks Andy, you rock!)

It addressed the following issues:

1. Developing rigs for Maya, Softimage and any other software (Fabric?)
2. Developing rigs for games, animated features, episodic television and vfx.
2. Naming convention mapping between all objects, controls for different studios.
3. SQLite for storing, geom, transforms, weights.

Anyway, to cut what could be an incredibly long story short we Opened Sourced the tools some time ago but ....didn't tell anyone. I thought some of our work might be of use to you guys:

Two years amount of work here, it might speed things up.
https://github.com/abuecker/Zoogloo-Tools

Warmest regards.