'Follicle Joints' Rigging Tool Demo - Nathan Chisholm
Channel: TheNathanChisholm
Date: 2015-11-28

Name: FollicleJoints
Author: Nathan J. Chisholm, November 2015
Version: 1.01
License: Portfolio piece only; Tool not licensed for commercial or personal work, at this stage.

Purpose:
To function as a Maya rigging API for working with 'follicle joints': a node setup which provides a (skin-able) joint, attached to a shaped and rigged surface, which is able to slide along it according to UV parameters, using only native Maya nodes. Useful both for traditional 'ribbon' techniques and for more advanced layered facial rigging etc.
Ultimately this allows a rigged sliding offset between an underlying surface shape and the final geometry, eg. skin sliding over teeth, bones and eye lenses.
The UI is a simple interface to the API. It hard codes some values that the API leaves open, such as the centre-line being a U value of 0.5 for mirror operations.

Code: Python
Environment: Autodesk Maya. Tested on Maya versions 2011 and 2013, with PyQt installs, on Windows.
Main Modules:

    PyMel (Object oriented Python for Maya)
    PyQt (Python wrapper around Qt for interface) and sip