thong rig

I spent today on the rig for the thong model. Not too many problems here, though the model needed adjusting slightly so that the rig from the previous model could fit. Painting weights was not a problem this time. In fact I'm glad I had the opportunity to do it again, as it has completely cleared up any uncertainties I had before about what I was doing wrong. I have the workflow nailed and once the penny dropped I encountered no issues I couldn't solve.

The butt clench however proved to be a bit more of a problem than I first thought. Skin clusters can be difficult to control when it comes to parenting the control object to the root controller. Origonally I had two objects controlling the respective cheeks which were then in turn controlled by a master butt control. I ultimately had to ditch this, and resort to grouping the butt clusters together, and linking the scale x factor to a new attribute on the butt control. This provides the necissary butt clench, and the butt geometery itself doesn't deform when moving the root controller. However, this has also meant that the clench is entirely linear, and does not clench to account for any angles other than the standing pose. I don't think this should be a problem as this is probably only going to be used when hes standing straight anyway. I might try and work something out that might be a bit more diverse tomorrow, but until then here's a quick playblast of the control.

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 :-)

Yes another rigging problem

Ok so I was just trying to do a quick rig on the zip, connecting the rotations to an outside object. The good news is, this works perfectly. The bad news is that in fiddling around I have discovered a new problem. Having parented the non-bound eyes/mouth/zipper to the root joint, this in turn means it is parented to the pelvis control. This in turn means that if I want to make the rig control layer non-visible (which is essential, otherwise there will be objects floating in front of the character in the film), it also makes the facial geometery invisible.

I'm not going to try and solve this now, simply because I really want to go home.

Painted Weights

The main bulk of today was spent sorting out these problems with painting weights. Many tears were shed, and I nearly ended up owing the college money for a new computer, but with some moral encouragement from Dan and some very useful help from Alex Hulse I didn't have to resort to breaking anything!

The first issue that had been causing me problems was how I'd bound the skin to the character group rather than the individual geometery. This was probably confusing maya and causing the duplicate influences, but was easily solved simply by re-skinning.
The second issue was some keyframes on the mouth left over from Dans blendshape test. Again, easily solved by deleting those keyframes.
The third and most complex issue was my workflow. Alex suggested that I should focus on adding influence to joints that shouldn't be influenced by anything else so that nothing else can influence it. For example, completely flooding the afro geometery white so that no other joint can mess it up. After sorting out these main areas, it was just a case of fine tuning the other more delicate areas like the hands and feet. I still don't fully understand to be honest, but I definately have a much better idea of how to tackle painting weights now.

Another thing I picked up from Alex was not to bind anything that's going to be blendshaped or rigged further. I.e. the zip, as this will disable the ability to do anything with it. Instead I have parented them to the root controller (pelvis) so that they will still always stay with the model.

So here he is in all his arrogance! I'm very pleased with this rig. There's still 2 more things I want to do. One is to put a jiggle deformer on the Afro geometery, and the other is to sort the zip out so it can move. Both should be fairly straightforward processes and shouldn't take too long.

I havn't shown everything the rig is capable of in this playblast, mainly because it seems like a waste of time to go about keyframing all of that. Basically the full description of how it works is a couple of posts down.

Bouncy

Been working pretty hard on the rig this weekend. It's not finished yet, but I just had to post this test playblast simply because it's one of the funniest things I've ever seen. I almost don't want to paint weights!! (I will of course.)

Basically what I still need to do is sort out the orientation of the wrist joints, as at the moment they do not correspond to the rotation of the hand controllers. You can still rotate the hands, but its not very user freindly.

http://www.johnson-mortimer.co.uk/SJT_Full_Tutorial_List/SetupTutorialPages/Steven%20J_%20Tubbrit%20-%20Character%20Rigging%20Page%20005.htm

I will be following this link for the continuation of the tutorial, mainly so I can understand how to get a low rez version of the model to animate with that can be turned into the high rez model when it comes to render time.

Other than that it's pretty much a finished rig. (Painting weights and full blend shapes aside.) I decided not to give him a flexible spine, as he is pretty much a walking head, and a bending spine within that would look weird. I also decided there was no point in placing locators for the eyes as he has no pupils.

I've locked off every attribute that will be useless to make animating and keeping the graph editor tidy easier. I also created new attributes to control the fingers/thumb/feet/elbow movements. Im pretty pleased with it so far, as there should be no need to ever go into the skeleton during animating.

Rigging tutorial

Tutorialized is an excellent resource for easy to follow tutorials in any programme, including maya. Here's a link to the tutorial thats helping me with the character rig.

http://www.tutorialized.com/view/tutorial/Character-Rigging-in-Maya-Part-1/24521