Wednesday 24 February 2010

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.

Monday 15 February 2010

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!

Thursday 11 February 2010

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.


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.