So during week 3 it came down to finish up the base skinning and figuring out how I was going to tackle the corrective shapes and/or helper joints. My mentor showed me a video of some tools he uses that I found to be very useful so did my best to re-create them. While doing so I came up with these two tools.

Tools

• Skin Weight Slider – I really just wanted to get out the idea that was in my head. I have seen nudge tools in the past, but as I was working I visualized a graph with colors to represent the weight values, and sliders to control them, the sliders would update as other influences changed. In a way it is just more simplified and interactive component editor. Still needs some tweaking to make the calls to get the weights smoother. It also has a button to show the influenced verts of the selected joint.
• UV Pose Driver  – This one is like a simplified PSD tool. It creates a shape on a joint that reads the point on surface where the joint above is in relation to, by keeping a 0-1 value the info from the uv co-ords can be used to drive a corrective shape. Still updating this one as I go as well. The way the tool works is:
  • Select a blend shape from list (updates blend target list)
  • Select a blend target
  • Give pose a name
  • Create it, then position it at the angle where you want the values to be driven.
  • rinse and repeat.

I’m a week behind but that’s better than 2 weeks behind right? This weeks focus was on joint placement and initial skinning of my character. The character’s name is Frank and he is from a short film that a friend and I have been working on, he did the modeling and character design.

Challenges

• Frank is fat, let’s not beat around the bush. Volume preservation is probably the most important and challenging thing for this guy. His neck and wrists, oh, and that huge gut too are all in need of clever joint placement and weighting.
• Pants are a challenge in this case due to the shape as well, making sure he keeps his butt volume when squatting down while not overly scrunching up the front of the pants is still work in progress. Most likely some corrective shapes will be in order.
• His shirt will be skinned overtop of his body and will have some nCloth on it with the inputMeshAttract turned up so it’s just subtle enough to get some nice sliding and secondary motion on the collar and sleeves. Keeping the speed up the rig up and avoiding intersecting mesh will be…fun.

References

The references I was able to gather helped with the joint placement. If you look at the image below with the x-rays you can see how deceiving the outer flesh shell can be. The skeleton is a normal slender frame and joint placement should reflect that in a character that is larger like Frank. There another image from Wreck-it-Ralph that I thought was as great example of volume preservation in a tough pose, so I used that as a goal to get Frank into something similar.

I haven’t added any helper joints yet, that will be week 4 (technically this week), week 3 Updates soon. I think the hands and shoulders turned out the best, I hoping to make the wrists awesome too.

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I finally started my first 6 week session with rigging dojo! Seemed like was never gonna happen but it did, I can tell I’m going to get a lot out of this based on all the questions I’ve already got answers to, I need to think of more. I will be posting progress on what I’m working on as time permits, hopefully one a week.

This weeks focus is to first off answer a ton of questions I have, then figure out goals for the next few weeks based on specific areas of focus like deformation, mesh articulation and more…

What is Rigging Dojo? In a nutshell its a personalized course on rigging or scripting with industry professionals. Click on the image to find out more about it.

This still not perfected but it’s close, I’m just experimenting a little to try and think out side the box

Well I figured I should just go ahead and start displaying what I have been working on in my secret lab the past little while in the hopes that putting it out there will actually make me finish the thing. Also to post a history of my workflow and some tips about things I have learned on the way. What is this “Black Box” you say? At first it was to be my custom modular rigging tool, and now it has become a mini character animation pipeline so to speak. The idea behind the name is to have a tool that plugs into everything so the modules are built in a way that allows changes to be made to the rig after it is deemed “complete” which never happens which is why a feature like this is important. Some features include:

• Modular character rigging
• Template saving and loading
• custom character GUI layout built in
• pose library built in
• other TD tools for common tasks that tie into the rigs

Aside from this I plan to add a facial rigging portion dubbed “Gray Skull” that will allow for a standardized joint based rigging approach for most characters. The final tool I plan to add to this dubbed “Chop Shop” is a modular vehicle/mechanical rigging portion that will be used for..well…vehicles and stuff, it will focus more on dynamics and plugin development.

This is way too much for one to handle! Why are you doing this dummy, it has been done before!? Originally this whole thing was thought up a few years back when buddy of mine and some other friends from school were going to make a short film. I had started a rigging tool and then that dream was abruptly cut short after loosing my job (darn you federal reserve and bailouts that cause layoffs!) so it had to go on hold while I acquired some kind of vocation to support the fam, but enough sob story. I heard more about these ‘modular rigging’ things and found out, hey I need to learn Python since MEL ain’t gonna cut it anymore (although still alive just not useful outside of Maya). Needless to say, the root of this comes from a DVD by Steve Twist that is a doozy for a beginner at Python but I had somewhat of a coding background so it wasn’t too crazy, just time consuming. As of recently I have been slowly coming to the conclusion that the current system in place needs a lot of work although it works for now, much more is to be done. I think I want to convert it to PyMel as I have not yet made that jump, no time better than now right? Basically I want a tool that allows me to be my own little studio if a decent size freelance comes up I can handle it. I’ve even got a Kinect now and plan on adding a mo-cap layer in there somewhere.

So! On to the learning stuff, first stages:

1. Think About it sit down and figure out what you are trying to accomplish and make goals
   
2. Make a features list list all the “wish list” items you can think of, even if you have no idea how to do it
   
3. Always Sketch the UI Before Implementation, show it to others before you get started for feedback as well.

Here are my initial sketches part of what it looks like in Maya so far:

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One thing to note is all of this is still subject to change. Don’t limit yourself to just one design because it might be more work to redo it. Which brings me to my next point…keep your UI separate from your main code and other modules, this way if there IS a change then it will only affect this one file since the functionality should not be affected by the users interaction with the interface. I think this a good first post, more to come.

A new tutorial on how to create a squash and stretch control that can be moved to any point around the ball.

I had a project recently that led to me discovering a useful but often overlooked (by me) menu known as deformer sets.

As an example let’s say you have a ball that is deformed by a lattice. Then you need to have another ball deformed by that same lattice, well that’s what the deformer set menu is for.

It can be found under Window>Relationship Editors>Deformer sets.

To get the now unaffected sphere to be affected by the lattice, simply select the ffd set for that lattice in the left column and then the object you want to be influenced by it in the right.

Now the object is affected by the lattice. (The image looks weird because the sphere isn’t  sitting in the center of the lattice).

Okay, now what if you only wanted a specific part of that object affected by the lattice? You can use the Edit Membership tool under the animation set in Edit Deformers> Edit Membership.

Make sure you have the lattice (or whatever other deformer you are using) selected. Hold down shift then use the cursor to select the verts you want to add or use ctrl to deselect them. Now you can see that the specific area that was selected is being deformed. That’s all there is to it!

I just a made a short tutorial , a tip really on how to use a modeling tool to rig a bellows.

In this tutorial I show how to setup a limb that can utilize no-flip and a pole-vector at the same time.

No-flip+Ik Limb Tutorial from Matthew Murray on Vimeo.

AnimSchool just released their Malcom rig. The animations they have made so far have been awesome. You can get it here:

http://www.animschool.com/DownloadOffer.aspx

Review

After downloading and taking a look at the rig I must say I was surprised at how simple the rig was for how much control can be had with it. When I say simple I mean simplicity, specifically with the arm pull-off controls, no ribbons or splines, just a floating joint. This allows for the desired effect minus some of the cpu taxing calculations of the other setups(although I fear could be broken rather easily). The controls were a little messy for my liking but better than a lot out there. Most of the rig is joint driven with just a couple of blends for the face, this helps keep the rig light and speedy. The hands have very nice deformation on the fingers. There are a few custom attributes that allow for changing the appearance of the character. One that stood out was the leg cuffs, with this attr you can change the wrinkles in the characters pants.  I haven’t seen an attr like that and it gave me some ideas, it just scrambles some of the verts in that area, I think i’ts based off a linear SDK set to infinity. Over the rig is great for animators, plenty of controls to fix gimbal lock and other tweaks you might need to let the animators expressions shine through.