Runescape Trailer

It's been quite a while since I posted anything, mainly because I've been busy at work, and anything I do can't really be showcased until it's been released. And then you will most likely need a Runescape account*.

Although today I can show off the trailer we have been working on over the last 2 months!
This has been produced by about 10 contributing animators, including myself, and 2-3 modellers. One big thing to note is how this has been produced using the Runescape engine, which has no IK and a grid system we have to take into account. Saying that, I think we all did a great job!



As some form of guideline to what I did, I can say I animated the initial scene where the knight drops to the floor, some of the skeleton horde, and a couple of the heroes' actions.

Hope you enjoy!

*If you do have a Runescape account, check out the recent golden hammer emotes, that was me :P

Not necessarily animation, but...

I recently discovered a pretty cool artist/illustrator called Luke Pearson who has a nice style and some really clever ideas that span from a single image to a set of comic strips. Definitely worth a look.

http://thatlukeperson.blogspot.com/

Character rigs

Here's a site with a load of interesting character rigs. And they're all free. Creative Crash is always good, but sometimes it gets a bit bogged down with simplistic setups, a bit too basic for anything reel-worthy.

Anyway, check out http://animationbuffet.blogspot.com which also has a couple of handy categories to filter out what you're looking for, be it cartoony rigs, creatures, females or whatever. There's a good few to experiment with, and seeing as the guy tests each one himself, it seems to be a good call. It's also linked from www.11secondclub.com which is also a trusty sign.

Speaking of which, this month's 11 second club clip seems pretty good, so time allowing I shall be having a bash at this. Haven't decided what rig yet, but said website is a good place to look.

Anyway, I am busy busy and had severe lack of internet, hence the declining posts. But I shall be sure to post new stuff or anything helpful.

Busy + No Internet

Feels like a good long while since I wrote anything here. Currently I have no internet in Cambridge, and I'm rather busy at Jagex; just started my second week and it's going rather well, a nice specific animation job so I'm enjoying doing what I love for a living. Hopefully once I've been here a bit longer, I'll get round to doing some of my own stuff and putting it on here in my free time.

Not much else to say right now. Be good

Elk Hair Caddis

One animation I'd like to share today is pretty impressive, by the sheer flexibility of the characters, and the nice real life stop motion feel it has. It's a nice dutch piece called Elk Hair Caddis, and features a bear and a frog having some peace and quiet. Kind of.

Elk Hair Caddis from peter smith on Vimeo.

In addition, there is also a behind the scenes video showing how it was rigged, animated, tweaked in post and such. What really grabs me is the amazing detail in the rigs. Everything has a control to really distort those shapes nicely, from the bear's ears down to the exhaust on the motorbike. If I could create rigs like this then I would be a happy chap.

MakingOf_ElkhairCaddis_peter smith from peter smith on Vimeo.

I will leave you all with that as a Friday treat.

Job

A much quicker update this time, so say as of June, I shall be a Runescape animator! It's exciting times, moving to Cambridge, meeting new people, and doing a nice relevant job.

Only other thing I can think of at the moment is that I recommend this book. It is a nice thick compilation of Muybridge's sequential photos, such as walks, runs, and more complex movements to show good shifts of weight. If you want some quadrupedal reference material, there is also a book on animals in motion. I highly recommend these for animators as there's nothing harder than getting good step by step stills of a walk; you just can't fake it on the spot.

Have fun

One month later...

Where has the time gone? It's been a whole month since I posted anything! If I could say that I've been doing loads more animation over that time, then that would be brilliant. However, I haven't.

Saying that, I have been to Cambridge to visit Jagex, the makers of the MMORPG Runescape. I've been interviewed for an animator's position, which is pretty exciting.

From my experience there so far, I can say that I have taken IK handles for granted so much. Naturally feet are just weighted to the floor, but when you don't have any form of IK or reverse foot lock, you have to look at the legs completely differently, as you have the hips and spine, then you work down the leg rather than just whacking a foot down and letting the knee work itself out. Tricky stuff, especially when appropriate weighting comes into play to ensure the centre of gravity is correct.

I shall update when I find out more about this application. In the meantime, enjoy your month, just in case I'm gone again. I'll try not to leave it so long.

Exercises for all to see

It's been a fun old week; one reason is that I've been doing night shifts so I sleep all day, animate in the evening, and work all night. The other reason is because I've actually been doing some quick animations requested by a games company so they can see what I'm capable of. Naturally, I've been using my fresh Mikey rig for these tests to give him some airtime.

First of all, I have a second long walk cycle, which has been looped over for your convenience. (The same keyframe is kept at frames 1 and 26, with just frames 1-25 playing endlessly) The last walk cycle I properly did was a while ago now, and when I look back on it, I see how robotic it is, and you can clearly see the seam where it repeats again. I've done a couple of steps for animations since, but nothing that is meant to cycle continuously so this problem hasn't been around much for the last year or so. However, by carefully going into the graph editor, and tweaking the tangents of the ends of every curve, the seam fades away. It's not really enough to simply ease in/out the curve tangent, as you still end up with a distinct arc where the pose is unnaturally settled in, then out in a noticeable manner. The curve needs to be treated as if it's carrying on, so the gradient remains pretty much the same if need be, rather than flattening out.

Saying this, I still found the cycle to have a slight slowdown, so I just dropped the final frame so it is just 24 frames for the 2 steps, and it sped the thing up correctly.

The other piece I worked on is a 6 second clip of a box being lifted, then put on a shelf. This was somewhat harder, as I've not really interacted with a heavy object before in Maya. Fortunately, I've been lifting boxes for the last week over and over, so watching myself in the reflections of glass has given me some fine reference material. The way I actually animated this was to get the poses down first, then use the dope sheet to sort out the timing, which was a pretty good method as long as the poses were kept to single frames at first. After timing was mapped out, all the keys were offset, extra keys were added for hips, hands, the node that controlled the hands and box together, if necessary. This took me a lot longer than the walk, but I'm pretty happy with the result after half a week.

These can also be found in the 'projects' section on the website, as well as on Youtube where they are hosted.

I've really enjoyed doing these short tests; they aren't as taxing as full stories that require script reworks and the results are visible within a couple of days, yet they are still worthwhile in the end and fun to do.

Animation exercises

Currently I am doing a few animated pieces. Nothing massive, just a few segments with motion and some lip sync bits with short soundbytes of about 10 seconds. The plan is to get some more decent tests that show off my animation skills with my finished stock rig (although this still has a few bugs. However this is why reference files are so handy. I can fix the original character rig, which is then updated in the animated scene)

One lip sync is using the Blake rig I have been raving about, which is pretty motion-heavy as it is due to the content being pretty enthusiastic. However, I've been stripping this down a lot to as few poses as possible. One reason is that the piece would eventually become a mime, and although body language is expressible, nobody really acts out every single word, and the whole lip sync gets very cluttered. Stripping the whole piece down to a couple of strong poses has a much better effect.

I am also using a couple of Muybridge's sequence of images as handy reference for motion. Once these sets of poses are established, I can then exaggerate arm swings, head motions and such to really bring some life to an otherwise natural action.

Sorry for the short post, hopefully I'll be able to put up some WIP when they are more polished.

Osipa Rig without the MEL script or expressions

If you've played with Blake, Package Man, Andy, Bloke or anything that refers to Osipa rigs or the Stop Staring book, I'm sure you will have come across Jason Osipa's facial setup. If not, it is essentially a way to reduce the number of sliders to activate blend shapes, by combining left and right sides of the face, as well as opposing expressions. For example, you can't smile and pout at the same time, so they go at different ends of a single control, as you're not going to need to use both at the same time. And if you have them separate, you will have to zero one out as the other increases. This then turns 2 different sliders into one, and if you control both left and right sides of the face with one control, then you have 4 blend shapes to control with just 1 slider. Pretty handy!

After mucking around with different techniques, such as building a number of GUIs to represent different parts of the face, where you rotate, scale and translate different handles for different effects, I decided that I wanted to implement the Osipa GUI into my rig. All the blend shapes had been built, separate left and right poses that merge together correctly, and then it dawned on me... I have NO clue how to get this to work when you have 2 axes to deal with in a slider.

It seems as if you should be able to set a driven key that switches the expressions on and off along the Y axis, then another to turn the left and right poses on and off along the X axis. However in practice this does not work, as the blends then go into negative values if you try to drive them with both translations. And this results in some weird effects, unless you like the vertices going in the complete mirror opposite direction half the time. Which I doubt you will.

Now, the Osipa melscript is kicking about on the internet to automate these sliders. However it failed to work for me on a combo of Windows 7 and Maya 2009, so that goes out the window. Also, being the control freak I am, I would like to know exactly what is going into this script to making it work (I am the equivalent of the kid who takes apart their TV to see how the men inside get on the screen, or the folk at the supermarket who meticulously read all the ingredients in their yoghurt). And I feel that simply blindly copying a chunk of script is cheating in the world of rigging. I also picked apart Blake's rig to see how that worked. It turns out that there's a lot of expressions in there (you can usually tell from the start when a channel is purple); none of which I really understood enough to create my own expressions to control the facial GUI.

Now, there are a couple of things I do know in Maya. Two of those are point constraints and driven keys. Luckily, these can be combined in a nice intricate system to make the 2 dimensional Osipa rig. Let me illustrate my methods:

This is the simple facial GUI. But there are a number of hidden treats:

I have a load of sneaky extra sliders that independently control left and right blend shapes. These work in single directions, along the Y axis. And what are the locators for? I'll show you in a bit. All I'll say now is they are locked; they don't move at all, just sit on the 0 on the X axis.

So as the sliders move up, or down, the blend shapes turn on and off, pretty much how the Blend Shape Editor works. However, we want to control both sides with one slider. In this case, the slider is point constrained (just the Translate Y, as that's the only way it moves) to the main controller, as well as that locked locator that will keep the slider, and therefore the blend shape, at zero. However, let's set that point constraint at zero, so the two do not interfere with each other incorrectly. These point constraints will be switched over as the main slider moves along the X axis, away from the corresponding side, using our friend, the driven key.

The reason we have to have the locator at zero also point constraining the slider is because if we just set the constraint to 0, it does not slide evenly; it merely snaps on or off whether the figure is at or above 0. Not what we want to get a near-infinite range of merging blends. What happens now is the two constraints will work together to equate to 1. The blend between the two figures brings the slider down at a happy gradient, so once the main slider moves along the X axis, one side of the face will fall at a steady pace, so we can move just the left side for example, without the right being affected at all.

This leaves us with a much simpler facial GUI. In fact I have just over 30 blend shapes (not including the brows or tongue. 11 of these sliders are used to control all those blends, with a few extra sliders to rotate the jaw, tongue, and to toggle the eye shifts as the eye control moves up and down. That's cut down roughly two thirds of the sliders originally needed. Result: a cleaner, easier to use rig, while keeping as much variety in the motion as possible. In fact, you only need to translate the sliders about, meaning you do not have to switch between rotations, scales, or sliding anything in the controllers' channels.

Actually, that's a fib, there is one rotation node to twist the tongue on rare occasions, but I shall ignore that.

This brings my rig construction to an end, with the exception of some texture/render jobs, but generally the character is pretty much ready for an animated piece. Keep your eyes peeled. For a treat, here's a quick snippet of what the facial rig can achieve.

Watch this space

Rig, skin, remodel, reskin

Here's an update, short and sweet.

So last week I skinned my character. Generally it was fine, just the usual things to do, such as remove the IK and FK arm bones as influences (I used the rigging101 method of IK/FK arm switching, as it works better than Maya's IK switch on the handles, and is a lot cleaner to work with, as you have designated bones for each function). The Jaw was the biggest issue, as it needs to be placed a lot further back into the head as you may think. Run your fingers along your jaw, and the pivot is more under your ears than where your cheekbones are; a common problem but it does affect that mouth.

After skinning, I decided the shoes weren't really up to much. I've always been a bit lazy with feet, as I end up making the entire body in one mesh, then fashioning some L-shaped stumps with the geometry I had left. Keith was the exception as he actually had to have toes, but shoes seem to be a bit lumpy. This time I remodelled them separately, so edge loops and such aren't bugging me. Then they were imported back into the rig scene, the old feet were chopped off, and new shoes combined to the footless mesh.

Just so my skinning wasn't wasted, I duplicated the body mesh, and used that as the body to attach new feet to. Then when this amended mesh was smooth bound, all I had to do was copy the skin weights over, directly by joint name so all I had to tweak was the new feet weighting.

I shall leave you all like last time with a recent picture of the rig, posed for your pleasure.

Proxy!

Having built the character rig, I had 2 options; continue with the blendshapes, skinning and all the other bits of bobs to polish the character, or make a quick proxy rig so the skeleton is somewhat useful in the animation process right now.

I picked the second, seeing as it's slightly more productive to have a working, yet basic, puppet right now over having to spend a good deal more time on rigging before I can make use of my blood, sweat and tears.

Essentially what I have produced is a series of cubes to represent each appendage, scaled and shaped to best match the body shape, while keeping to the 6 faces. These are then pretty much parent constrained to the bones (the limbs have scale connections as well to allow for the stretchy limb features, and the torso was subdivided a few times, then smooth bound to the spine) to show roughly what the body will move like. At just under 300 faces and minimal binding, it will also run quicker on a PC so it has benefits after the model itself is complete.

Here is a quick pic to show off the Proxy

Enjoy!

Awesome Spine

This is more of a link to someone else's blog, as it's worth checking out if you're rigging a spine. I've made FK backs, and IK Splines, with mixed feelings about all of the results. Ideally you want a nice smooth shape that doesn't leave you fighting against the way the joints orientate and so forth; most of the time splines have flipped out on me in weird ways.

So yeah, check out http://faithofthefallen.wordpress.com/2008/10/08/awesome-spine-setup/

I've implemented it into my rig, and it works nicely. Enough control, yet enough fluidity and flexibility to be a nice alternative to the ribbon spine that is spoken about so much on the internet. With a proper squash and stretch attribute, maintaining the torso volume, this will be a very clean way of working.

Couple of side notes: a joint chain of 6 works best, with 5 IK handles. It's easy maths and has been used on this tutorial. 4 IK chains gets awkward as it's an even number... and do you even need more than 5 IK handles? Nah.

Another thing I noticed and researched was 2009's bug where the plus-minus-average node does not allow you to physically attach 2 inputs to the Input1D (you can't drag a connection to create an Input1D[1], you'll see what I mean when it comes to it). It just requires a bit of copying, pasting and tweaking in the script editor, no biggie.

The rig is nearly finished, bar the fingers and facial controls. Then the task of creating stretchy arms and torso. After that, I'll crack on with the blendshapes, which will be fun as I have a nice GUI in mind. Think Package Man or Blake style.

Reverse Hand Lock

This isn't something I've done, but more something to ponder for rigging.

The typical way the foot, and reverse foot lock, works is by having a series of single chain IK handles down the foot, then parenting those to a separate set of joints that flows in the opposite direction of the original chain. This allows the character to rotate the heel, toe, and ball of his foot, while keeping the toes locked down onto the floor (or wherever the controller is). Ultimately what you have is an IK leg, with various pivot points about the foot for different poses and points where the weight is going.

So how about this; a reverse hand lock? It's essentially the same idea, but you can put pressure on the fingers, lifting the palm of the hand up, which would prevent any fingers sliding about as, say, a character vaulting over an object where the weight is shifted over different areas of the hand, then lifted off as the feet come back into contact with the ground.

In theory, you'd have the same chain of shoulder>elbow>forearm roll>wrist>hand>fingers>fingertips, and then a reverse chain following through the hand to meet the same attributes in the foot.

However, I'm clueless to why this doesn't work in practice. The extra finger joints most likely cause significant problems as they somehow need to be anchored.

So that's my thought for the week... is a hand lock worth investigating? And how would it best be accomplished?

UV unwrapping

Hey all, thought I'd comment a little on a handy, albeit slightly old, tool in Maya for UV mapping. There's no doubt about it, everybody has to hate UV mapping. Not too bad on simple box-like objects, but with a character it's a chore, to keep the UVs as undeformed as possible, while keeping them somewhat seam-free so it's easier to work with in Photoshop or what have you. I've managed to map the body of my character with a lot of automatic mapping, which is then sewn back together piece by piece (auto mapping ends up supplying you with 10-20+ small chunks of your model, but they're pretty much distortion free which is much nicer than planar mapping). Pretty straightforward for arms and legs, a little more painstaking for hands.

But yeah, the head is a completely different ballpark. Automatic mapping gave me far toooo many small pieces; may as well just split every polygon up for me to sew like a massive jigsaw. The university/textbook method of planar mapping, then cutting the head in half, then Polygon>Unfold method is alright (it's seen me through 3 years, sort of) but it's some sort of trial and error to unfold half a head properly without it turning into an indistinguishable dinosaur head.

This is what I was going to mention earlier comes in handy. 'New' to 2009 (yes, I am behind with the times) is a nice feature called the Smooth UV Tool. Pretty much what it does is gets rid of all those overlapping UVs that play havok with a mesh with a simple mouse click+drag. For example, here is the front of my character's face, planar mapped away from the rest of the head (I'll sew the rest back on later in chunks)

Those purple bits are overlapping faces in the UV map, which we want to get rid of before we can be sure the mesh is spread out flat on the grid. Thanks to the Smooth UV Tool, all that needs to be done for that is to select the surrounding UVs (let's do the eye as an example). A small dialogue box appears underneath; all we do is click and drag on 'relax' and Maya does the rest for us.

All the overlapping UVs are now inside that eye socket, flattened out nicely. I've also gone ahead and done the same to the other eye and the mouth. The level of distortion of the UV arrangement is minimal as well. Now to pull out those cheeks and chin. This works the same way of selecting the group of UVs, then using the 'Unfold' tool instead.

Obviously this still needs tweaking, but in a few short clicks, the face has been unwrapped in some awkward spots, saving a lot of time.

On a side note, I've got a nice new PC. However the only thing that is on it is Maya. With a lack of Photoshop for the time being, I had a quick go on Windows 7 Paint. It's actually pretty good considering it's Paint, that godawful program that used to destroy .jpgs and resizing images. It does it pretty well this time round. Obviously no Photoshop, but a lot more inviting to use than before.

2010

Hello all, apologies for severe lack of updates. I hope everyone had a good Xmas, and an equally good New Year!

2010's resolution is to get more animation work done, preferably the stock rig completed and a few animation exercises to add to my range of work.

Hopefully I'll have more work to show off soon. Stay tuned.