Rigging the Body... Problem Solved?!

As you may remember from earlier in my blog, I was having major problems with the skeleton coming out of Melvin's body when I point constrained the clusters in his back to the curves to control him. To be honest I gave up pretty easily to concentrate on my blend shapes, but having done so to a reasonable level I thought I would approach it again with a fresher (not as annoyed)mind.

I started the chapter on creating the clusters again incase this was the problem and followed through the tutorial. Ths same thing happened again with the skeleton coming out of Melvin's body.

Again I played around for ages and found that when they had been constrained some of the clusters had translated when they needed to be at 0. It was really that simple! Grrrr.

Here you can see the local control working so that his hips rotate.

However, I also want him to be able to twist easily without over rotating, so I set up an extra attribute in order to do so:


It is probably not very clear from the image, but this shows the twist working:

And here is the rig as it stands, with leg, arm and body controls:

After doing this I really want to learn how to set up the hand joints to finish the body completely. I have decided not to focus on weights in the body until I have downloaded Maya 2011 so I can use the newer Paint Weights tool, which I will hopefully have and be able to test tomorrow.

More Rigging Tutorials

Learn How to rig a character in Maya for beginners. For more Maya How-To Videos & Articles, visit WonderHowTo.

This video is a bit all over the place, but it is interesting to see a four legged creature being rigged.



Another overview of a rig video:

Evaluation

My aim for this project was to learn Rigging, focusing on Blend Shapes whilst also continuing with my animation.

Where I have succeeded:


I have really enjoyed learning new skills and pushing my knowledge of Maya even further, whether this is by doing the complex rigging to learning new shortcuts. I believe I have particularly succeeded in creating working Blendshapes for a head model, which I was then able to animate with.

I never knew anything about painting weights in Maya, and although I still find it difficult to achieve the results I want sometimes, I am happy to be able to do so. I received a Wacom tablet in December and this has sped up the time it takes really effectively. I also believe I am quicker as I know relatively what I am doing and which vertices I need for clusters etcetera.

I also think my animation has improved from last year, as during the summer I learned how to use the graph editor more effectively and ‘step’ the animation in key poses before following straight through. My run cycles show evidence of this as I took longer to do so than just rushing straight in.

Where I have not succeeded:

The main area I did not really succeed was with the body rigging, as I decided to focus on the facial rigging and be able to develop this to a good standard.

This is one of my main aims for the next week or so is to try and see where I went wrong with the back clusters or to find a different tutorial to follow. If there is one thing I have learned from this process it is that one tutorial is never enough. For example, with the facial animation I used the Autodesk tutorial to create the blend shapes using painting clusters, but then at times I needed to use Curves as a Wire Tool to be able to manipulate the mouth further. This I had learned from initially practicing on Melvin from the old Learning Maya 5 book.

I think it will be the same with the body rigging, if I can follow through another tutorial, preferably one that rigs all at once, I should be able to combine it with my previous knowledge and create some great results.

Overall:

I am happy with what I have learned this term, especially with my facial rigging. I feel confident to use this in the future for my final year film, as well as for other groups if they require it.

What I have learned:
Rigging – Skeleton
IK/FK switches
Constraints for the feet
Using Clusters
Rigging- Facial
Edit Membership tool
Painting Clusters Weights in the face
Using Wire Tool for mouth expressions
Creating Blend Shapes for the eyelids, eyebrows and mouth
Rigging the Eyes using a Locator Aim orient


There are many little bits to add to this such as how to label prefixes easily and the Connections editor, but these are the main points.

Add to this Dynamics playing with Fire and Water, which I am still trying to fix the problems with, and I feel I have had a successful term.

Aims:

Carry on with the body rigging – hopefully this will be complete by the 10th of January for this project hand in
Keep Practicing! I want to facial rig a more cartoon style animal next rather than a realistic human head.

Dynamics: Flowing Water

After concentrating on facial blendshapes for a while, I wanted to do something a bit different so went back to Dynamics, where I found this running water tutorial:

Firstly the emitter was placedjust below the shower head:

But the particles were omni n went off in all directions:

They were then set to directional so that the particles fell as so:

In order to make them look more realistic, I added Gravity to effect the particles so they fell in more of an arc rather than in a straight line.

However, the particles still went through the bath, so I selected the particles and the bath and made it so that they collide.

The videos show the effects of the collision, and I have been having a bit of trouble with getting the particles to behave themselves.

I tried changing some of the settings and deleting the second set of particles that appeared, but the first set still goes through the bath a little bit. I do not think this would matter in an environment with a floor for example if this was in a bathroom there would be a plane underneath that would hide it going through. I may do a bit more testing on this tomorrow or over the weekend to see if I can improve it.

Animation Tests

snatched animation tests from Hayley Allen on Vimeo.

These were animation tests for our film Snatched.

Some of the story has changed though, so I don't think I need the character to fall over, and I think I should practice more on the wheels and running to show real power and thought behind the run, make it looks like he really wants the food he is chasing.

Untitled from Hayley Allen on Vimeo.

Also I missed this one out of the video, this was to show a more subtle side with more thought than action. The beginning of our film needs this in order to set the scene and provide a juxtaposition to the chaos that will happen afterwards.

Render Tests 003

These show the test when rendered, although for the first one Maya had randomly changed the camera from camera01 to Front view and vice versa, so I had to render it out again to get the movement.

I then simply googled scroll textures and added this to the background:

In After Effects, the head layer was dragged onto the background but it still shows the black as so:

To change this I used the Luma Key effect on the head layer and keyed out the black. This is a rough cut that I did very quickly but you can see the aim of how it would look when finessed.

Here is the finished video:

Snatched Render Test from Hayley Allen on Vimeo.

I have learned an awful lot during this whole process, from the rigging of the head and the blend shapes to the texturing, how the camera moves would look etc.

I do think this style could be really effective and make our film stand out from the rest.

I then used the video of the flame test I tried earlier in the term.

It doesn't look as effective, but I think this is partly because I need to just have the flame without the frey cylinders I put it on, as this would have the Toon Shader applied to it anyway, and also because it takes up far too much of the screen. It will only have a small amount of screen space in our final film not take up the majority of it like here.

Render Tests 002

Testing the toon shader in Maya, I had to keep rendering it to see what the finished result would be, as you can see here it did not show up in the normal viewport:


These images show a few tests, simply by changing the influence of the red and black. I wanted to find a balance where the details of the face can be seen but it is not too over complex and the style is lost.

The black will be edged out in After Effects, so the red could not be too small that it cannot be seen but not too much that it over takes the face as in the last picture. If we are going to render in a similar style then we must be aware of this, and also make it unique for each individual model, as it will be different for each one.

The one thing I must test next is how this will look when two characters are in the same scene and whether they will be opaque or you will be able to see the other character's lines. This also may take into consideration different colours for each character to make them stand out and not merge.