I need some help figuring out how to do this correctly.

I have a model of a robot that uses the 2008 Rig.

The rig is installed according to the tutorial and everything is functioning correctly.

I have begun the rigging of the face by rigging, constraining, and creating percentage sliders for the right eye.

There are (18) bones in to pose the eyelids and brow shape.

I have used the "mirror bone" plugin and now have all the bones in the left eye with the correct CP weighting.

PROBLEMS:

How do I get the constraints mirrored to these eye bones?
I have tried to use "mirror constraints" but it want to mirror ALL the constraints including the 2008 Rig constraints that are already done.

How do I get the pose sliders for the left eye bones percent poses to mirror the right eye?
I can't find anything to show how to get the pose sliders mirrored for the other eye.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Here is a picture of the bones that are mirrored inthe left eye.
You can see some of the sliders for the right eye that need mirrored for the left eye in the PWS properties.

Click to view attachment

So the problem is not mirroring constraints, it's duplicating pose sliders to do on the left what they do on the right?


hmmm... I'm not sure there's a tool for that.

If your pose sliders are affecting only bones and your bones are exactly named left and right, I can dimly imagine a text editing solution where you would copy a section that contains these poses and then search/replace "left" for "right".

If you have never text edited an A:M file before this would be a major adventure, however.

That is where I was beginning to think the solution would lie.
I have not tried to edit an AM file but I believe they are XML format correct?

I have written VB.NET stuff with RegEx to manipulate other types of files.
I've done it with Excel also.

As long as I can figure out the file structure so I don't throw AM a bad format I think I may be able to figure it out.

Thanks for the direction,


EDIT: Looking at the file in a text editor, it appears to follow the PWS layout very closely. that should help.

I did manage to get this to work manually. There is more to do for some constraints that rename "right" to "left" but it was doable.
I had to edit the Y and Z in a few cases to mirror the constraint properly. It was just a matter of reversing the signs (+/-) once you found the ones that needed the fix.
It was a tedious job to do manually as you have to insure you are capturing the entire XML element for each constrain and placing it in an acceptable place within the existing elements you already have.
It took a few tries to get it and some hunting for a way to guide me to the opening and closing of the elements.
The nice thing is I get exact mirrors of the constraint and its control slider this way.

It gives me hope that it can be done programmatically but I need to better understand all the possiblities in the model file before I can parse one correctly.

I am tweaking the rig in the robot and hope to post it again in the WIP when he is capable of showing some of his stuff.

Cheers,