These are illustrations I made to help visualize a couple of tools. Its possibly a secondary way of finding quickly what a tool does as supplement to the documentation or as aiding the scripting process.
For (illustration for node based spine ik stretching) it shows the potential of an illustration helping the scripting side for the tool. It shows a zoomed in picture of what is needed for one case and below it shows a larger picture of how all the parts would fit together.
A couple of tips in making these sort of charts in Adobe Flash is to create a library of symbols example (text, boxes, arrows, animator control curves, circles, joint symbols, limb symbols, node symbols …). Then using Flash tools like the group tool and graphic symbol it helps to reuse parts (after breaking apart symbol) or keeping parts together. For example the group tool helped to keep the text and the graphic together. Also I made the text a graphic symbol which after broken apart could be edited.
Hope this is helpful,
Regards,
Nate
I first learned about Spine IK stretching, using many of the built in Maya nodes like (reverse, blendTwoAttr, multiplyDivide), and using pictures for rigging problem solving from reading Jason Schleifer's Animator Friendly Rigging (jasonschleifer dot com).
