2nd week bapping it out.

Jan 17th - 23rd

For these videos Ive uploaded them to youtube real quick just to show the problems, the quality is pritty terrible but il work on getting some decent quality videos out with sound when I get time. To view whole video you may have to double click it.

This week the first thing I set out to do was to get the foot rig nailed, I created a reverse foot as standard, but the real trick was building a hand rig over the top as bap would need to use his feet like hands as well. So I built a seperate hand rig for the feet which wasn't a big problem, I just built a hand with set driven keys as I normally would a hand, but due to time constraints I just built in only the necessary controls for spread and grip. When I get more time I may intergrate some individual controls for the sake of making a more user friendly rig. The main problem I came across was once I connected the hand rig to the reverse foot. When I animate the foot ballroll, the back of the hand would roll up with the ankle and the fingers would roll down rather than staying with the reverse foot toes as you can see at 0.46 on the above video. Other than this though the hand rig seemed to follow the foot perfectly fine. To solve the problem I once again added in locators to zero out the joints and stop flipping which was also occuring. The locators helped the joints of the hand rig to follow the foot rig and roll up onto the knuckles as it should while maintaining the animatable features of the hand rig.

The above video shows the next part of the rig I tackled was the tail, which I made a basic set of fk controls for individual control and set driven keys to control all the joints from the base to allow for tail curl and tail wagging. The next aspect of the rig which I proceeded to work on was the shoulder, which I made stretchy and wasn't to much of a problem to make. The only real trick was connecting the stretchy shoulder into the global scaling of the rig which took a bit of fiddling in the hypershade to get right as the shoulders were not scaling correctly with the rest of the rig. Once the scaling of the stretchy shoulder was incorperated into the global scale the rig scaled up and down fine with the shoulder following correctly. Below is a quick demo video of the shoulder joint.

 So to round up the second week of blasting the rig below is a video of the changes made to the rig over the last week. The rig has been split up into layers, which has really helped stop me from selecting bits that are already done while still being able to see that they all work together. Ive also split up the outliner into an animation controls and off limits sections. The animation controls are hierachied according to the order you would want each joint to be controlled respectively. The off limits section contains all the joints and iks, splines ect that i dont want the animator to touch. There is also a geometry group which contains most of the geometry which I also dont want the animator to touch. Though this the video shows how all the corresponding parts of the rig follow. For example when the chest is moved and rotated the arms follow and when the the waist is rotated the top half of the body follows but also allowing for movements like waist rotations to simulate bum wiggle see 1.02 on video. Also of note is at 3.10 on the video which shows the solving of the alighnment problem I had with the ikfk joints. This was solved through using a rivet script which helped to correctly alighn the pole vectors which in turn solved the mis-alighnment. At 3.50 on the video it shows the fixing of the footroll problem previosly explained.

The next changes video shows the locking out of all unnecessary controls such as scale and rotate and translating where appropriate. It also shows the more organised and tidied up outliner. I always found keeping my outliner clean is a tip ive always valued and naming...NAMING everything. The COMMET rename script is really good for this and Id suggest everybody has the commet menu installed or the rename script at least on their shelf. The layers here help to show how ive locked down the joints and geometry so that all the animator can select is the controls bar a few joints in the feet. The next blog post will show some development in terms of topology changes and the start of the weighting process.