Wednesday, 25 August 2010

Firstly here is a render of Ian Elm from the brief animation test I created, again just the character going through a sequence and nothing major. The character seems to be working well except it had some strange popping in the render which was not in the scene. A bug I am hoping with that render and not a reoccurring problem (the part of the skin above the eyes twitched strangely)



I think to make sure its not reoccurring I will re render a short animation of the facial movement again to see if I can recreate the problem.
 
Anyway I have started the rig for Darren, and pretty much completed it except for the muscle bones and belly bone which I will add during skinning. Here is a screen shot




I thought I should now show what the rigs I have created for these series of characters can do since I am now on the last of the human characters. All of the characters have typical the same setup.

Firstly there is a foot role controlled by a Ui system




The foot can also be controlled by the UI on a refined set of sliders for the toes and lower foot, plus the toes of the Elmies are also controllable through the User Interface. The user interface as with all the latter rigs (the human factory characters for the feet used a normal attribute holder) are using Penns attribute holder, a plugin which is the same as the normal attribute holder except it can store poses that can be latter dialled back in (http://www.paulneale.com/scripts.htm) . I therefore also used the Penn attribute holder on the Facial UI for all the Visemes (will talk about that in a little blog).

The rig follows quite closely Pauls Neale’s tutorials on rigging with a few alterations to suit the characters. But the basics are from those great set of dvds.

Moving up the body this character as the rest have a stretchy bone system on the legs, this was done by using a script attached to the lower legs x position, enabling the bones to stretch without problems and bend with the HI Solver.




The main waist control is linked separately to the hands and the rest of the body, therefore enabling the hands to move in dependably.

The back is again using a stretchy bone system, and a series of stabilisers to enable the spine to move in much the same way as a human spine, using look at constraints, orientation constraints, positron constraints, and path constraints.



The deltoids of the arms are also scripted to stay in line with the clavicle while the bicep bends with the arm, therefore the skin can be weighted in-between with less problems and follows the movement on a typical arm in much the same way.



There is a Hi solver on the arms with a look at constraint at the back, a typical arm setup, but then a wrist constraint system is in place to enable the hand to rotate and the wrist follow in degrees, to give a fall off up to the elbow, as with a normal arm.

The hands are scripted as with all the human characters and similar to the feet so that I can move any of the fingers to a position using the star UI attached.



And finally the head as orientation constraints to give a fall off down from the head past the neck to the top of the spine, for better fluid control of the head movement.
After that each character also had muscle bones, and spring simulators where necessary. For Darren Elm he won’t have any bouncy fat so I won’t be using any sims but will be using muscle bones much the same was as the other Elmies.
Anyhow that’s a quick run down of the rigs.