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.

Door developement

Ok so having decided we would probably do the blendshapes when and where we need them, I've had time to continue work on the front door. Basically it was too plain for an object that's going to be seen close up. I had an experiment with the planks on a one in / one out pattern, but it looks bad, so instead I drew all the planks out and defined the gaps between them. This looks a lot better. Then there was the question of the wood texture. Mayas default 3d wood texture looks aweful no matter how much you play around with it, so I downloaded a better one from www.cgtextures.com. It is subtle and looks so much better.

Then I had to play with the gold texture a bit more, because in the current lighting for my scene it shows up a nasty brown colour. In playing with the abient colour and reflectivity, I inevitabley made it look brighter than the sun, but after further playing it looks ok.

I also took the reflectivity off of the tile material, so the porch roof isn't so shiny. I also had to use the automatic mapping function on the small steps, as the texture wasn't quite working.

Lastly, I switched the statues around so that they point towards the door rather than away from it. (It just makes more sense, and leads your eye into the door more.)

I'm pretty happy to call the door finished now.

Statues

Ok as I'm still pretty excited about the rig I decided to do one more thing with it before I call it a day. I really wanted to see how the statues look on the plynths at last. Basically I repositioned the rig into the statue position and duplicated the geometery, deleting any unnecissary parts of the rig to keep the scene clean. Then it was just a case of scaling it negatively to flip reverse the duplicate making for the nice mirror statue model.
I decided to use the same material that the pillars are textured in, because even though it's plain white the global illumination makes it look marbely. This is open to change if anyone has any good ideas, but one way or another I think the pillars and the statues are made from the same material. (Whatever that material be.)
I'm still inspired by the engraving Dan pulled off on his statue plaque, and I'm now wondering if these statues should have similar plaques made in stone. Looking at it the plynths look very very blank, and could perhaps use a plaque with "P.Fontana" engraved on it or something.
Comment any suggestions about this!
Or I could just talk to you both about it tomorrow. That's probably the best plan actually, considering I seriously doubt you'll be reading this before then.

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.

Change of scene

Gotta give credit to Dan for this idea. Basically rather than having the mansion set in an open plane with hills surrounding, I've changed it so it perks right on top of a stupidly steep hill. This not only fits in more with the origonal idea of having the mansion atop a hill, but also eliminates growing concerns of how the image plane would work. With the last ground plane, you would still be able to tell it's just a flat plane even with an image plane in the background. With this one, all I will need is a plane showing more hills surrounding this one. This should ease any restrictions on camera movement I might have had. It also looks more cartoony and fun, and has reduced my poly count immensely, speeding render time to 2 minuits 30. Great idea Dan!

I will still work into the ground closer to the mansion with the soft-mod tool as before, just to add some depth to the closeup shots.