Full complete rig

Ok I admit the title of this post is slightly misleading as there are no blendshapes yet, but I spent a lot of time today fine tuning. I sorted out the weights on the hands so they deform as they should. I also sorted out the afro with a jiggle deformer for automatic secondary animation, and also fixed the zip up with a controller. I also put a squash and stretch deformer on all of the geometery so Dan can give him some bounce when animating. This is controlled by the sphere with one attribute linked to the squash factor of the deformer. Min value -0.2, max value 0.2.

As for the problem of the face dissapearing when making the rig controls invisible, this was solved way easier than I thought last nite. It's a simple case of selecting the individual objects and turing off the visibility in the object display.

I had planned to get blendshapes done today, but made a fatal error by saving over the file I had been working on during the process, rather than making a seperate file to save the blendshape tests to. This mistake fully punished me when I found the rig had been de-skinned for some reason, and due to my frequent saves was unable to go back to when it was working. Luckily for me I had a seperate file from the beginning of the day, so all I had to do was repeat my whole days work to get it back to where it should be. This time I have 3 versions of the file saved, one to my memory stick, to ensure that this doesn't happen again.

So while I didn't quite get the rig fully ready to animate with today, it's still very nearly there, and I honestly think it's my best rig to date. I'm very pleased with myself on this one. Tomorrow I have to sacrifice the day so I can get my case report done and out the way, but over the weekend I plan to try and get the blendshapes done. I at least want to be able to give him to Dan and Phil by the end of monday, as all these rigging hiccups have set us back behind schedule slightly. Other than that, good days work!! I can sleep at last :-)