New years rigging progress.

In the next few posts il be doing a 3 week break down of the rigging of bap and then the rest of the modelling, texturing, scene layouts iv built so far and hopefully a few pritties. Its just a matter of the time it takes with my bad internet to upload videos, snap screenshots and the time i take out to blog. I plan to catch up on all progress so far very soon.

Jan 10th - 16th

Ok so soon as I started back after the new year and the bulk of the dissertation had been tackled. I dug my teeth back into the rigging of bap. I tried setting up individual controls using a script for each joint on the fingers but this didnt seem to want to work for me due to the script throwing up errors. I will probably come back to this at some point for my own learning as il probably need to learn scripting more for any future rigging i do.

So what i decided to do was to use good old fashion set driven keys which were simple enough to make, but they dont allow for as much control as individual control but I was under time constraints so I just got the job done. I think the finger keys I set do allow for a nice range of movement and I got in all the different movements that hands can do. I also started splitting the rig into layers see below.

The next task I attacked was the rigging of the fk_ik switch on the arms, I created the fk_ik blend and used a locate as a marker. The locator would follow which ever is active either the fk or the ik arm. The fk_ik blend worked, but there seemed to be a problem with alighnment of the joints on the wrist and hand which was due to the pole vector being ou of alighnment.

Below shows the alighnment problem.

Below shows the initial fk_ik switch.

The last thing I did this week was to mirror the joints across, but this cause some of the joints orientations to be flipped and the scaling reversed on some elements. So to solve the problem I put the locators on all of the left arm joints and put them into a group and mirrored the group. I then rebuilt the right arm over the locators to avoid the scaling and orientation problem. The other part of the rig that I actually did quickly during christmas was the stretchy spine, which I didnt think id need but I thought it would be nice to have it there in case the animator wanted the flexibility. I split the geometry up into sections so I could see how the geometry would roughly deform. See below for demo.