Thats it

Well I think thats about all the updates from the end of term now. Overall I suppose I'm not too happy with how this year has gone on my part. I kind of feel like I've spent my whole year rigging and not much of anything else; this is mostly a result of certain technical challanges getting the better of me. This lead to me holding up pretty much every group I worked with, especially Red Rock, which was supposed to be my primary group but I only ended up joining them half way through the last term, leaving Nate and Jak to do most of the project on their own. Bloody rigging... In my defense though I could find almost no help at all on these technical problems, so I took it upon myself to write my own tutorial lest I never forget..
I was definately hoping to get more out of the third year, but I do have some sense of accomplishment from it.. I remember looking back at the first year, using Moom for the first time and setting myself the goal of one day being able to rig like that; today I feel like I'm not actually that far off, which must be worth something.

Animation

Ok, im terrible at animating and I generally hate it but I thought I'd have a go at animating the last shot. Lonato and Nahil are fishing together having bonded over the storm. Lonato tries to cast his line, but has become un-practiced as a result of his old cushy lifestyle, and ends up throwing his rod into the river by accident.
So far it looks aweful, but its kind of getting there.

particle effects

carrying on with the updates from the last few weeks of the project, heres a few samples of some particle experiments I've been working on for the waterfall mist.













As you can probably tell it hasn't been going very well.. this is my first time touching particles, and to be honest its a bit late for me to learn and pull off something good as well- that said however, the basics are not as complex as I origonally presumed. Getting it to look right will probably require a lot more though

scalable ik fk switch

lonato rig

for the first time since second year, i had a proper bash at creating a facial interface- this one is much better than willie billiams, utilising more blendshapes and an interface that is representative of his head. I modelled about a quatre of the blendshapes myself, with Nate doing most of them while I finished the rig itself.

This rig is the first one I've succeeded in making fully scalable, and also has an IK/FK switch. It wasn't too much trouble to get any of this working, but overall I think the spine setup used for Jed is better as you can use both fk and ik controls at the same time- with a switch you cannot. Suprisingly though I was unexpectedly held up by weighting issues on account of the seperate head geometery coming apart at the seems. It took me a long time to work out an acceptable solution, which essentially involved going into the component editor and matching up the exact weight values for each vertex individually.
Unfortunatly it still doesn't look as good as it should- to avoid this in future the whole combined mesh should probably be used for the blendshape models, as I only found out recently you can delete all the blendshapes once linked up and it will still work fine.

Textured objects

Heres a couple of renders for the fishing pole and the bed- I got the textures from CGtextures.com, though made some colour adjustments and applied them to the UV maps. For the matress I applied a different texture (rather than the colour texture) to the bump layer to give it creases and folds

House texture test

texturing the house

After my brief texturing / UV mapping tutorial with Yaniv, and with Yaniv opting to weight the rest of his character himself, I've started texturing my unfinished house! I created a psd network using the uv texture editor, and so far have managed to get away with automatic mapping- Yaniv assures me I wont need to do anything more complex for cubic environmental objects. So far I have mapped the doors and one building section- I made the wall texture myself quite simply in photoshop, and re-applied the same texture to the bump attribute. The wood texture I found on cgtextures.com

Enjoying it so far, its a very welcome break from rigging!

weighting issues

Im having some issues with weighting this model- while the arms and head deform fine, everything else goes crazy! this image is of the leg after I weighted it- this shouldnt happen. Problem is that the other leg and the spine deform in a similar fashion, which still shouldnt happen despite not being weighted. Any clues as to what might be causing this?

rigging and modelling

Apologies for not having posted in a while- I finished rigging Jed, which was overall rather traumatic! haha very happy to have it done though, and it looks good! I will post up a demo once I have it sorted out along with a writeup of how it went and how it works. (Hopefully to make up for my recent lack of blogging.)

Since getting that finished I have returned to Red-Rock finally, and have been occupying myself with some modelling. I've modelled out the unfished building from the final shots (which I will blog up later once I have a few nicer renders).

Today though, I bashed out a rough bed and fishing pole, (above), and rigged the fishing pole.

Here is a quick and simple animated playblast to demonstrate:

So that works nicely.

I got Yaniv to go over UV mapping and texturing with me today, so I'm going to have a go at texturing these models myself as I direly need more material to fill out the art and animation sections of the unit!

Spine problems

back to rigging Jed then. Ive been trying to remember how to rig the spine the way Sultan showed us last year, but I cant remember at all- nor can I find the lecture notes on moodle. Basically it was an Ik/Fk switching spine. I tried this tutorial, http://www.jawa9000.com/Technical/FK_IK_Spine/FK_IK_spine.htm but its rubbish.
going to get on with the arms and legs until i find some better info.

Splay Demo

Finished rigging Splay today, so heres a demo demonstrating where the controls are:

The legs are fully stretchable; either move the feet controls or the hip control.
The cylinders used to bend the legs are accessed through an attribute on the foot controls. (you can also view the leg length through an attribute here.) Phil, I've tested it to make sure it can do those leg deformations you needed, and with the control cylinders you ought to be able to achieve it from any angle. They look pretty damn smooth too. Up close the left leg seems to deform a bit smoother, but really from most distances and angles it makes no visual difference.
The extra controls for deforming the head are accessed through the main head controller.
The eyes are selectable- you can animate them directly, and you'll probably need to to account for any unusual head deformations should you chose to go crazy!



The file is uploaded to rapidshare- heres the URL:

http://rapidshare.com/files/361592863/splay_rigged.mb.html

Give it a go, play with the splay, and let me know what you think. If anything needs to be adjusted I'll sort it out before friday.

Slight problem with splay

Ok first, sorry I havn't been posting on my blog for a while, it got flagged as spam and they locked it, and then took about three weeks to unlock it. I've made a lot of progress on the Ed rig for Polished off, and finished it yesterday. I've been updating on the Polished Off group blog while mine was locked, but I'll post up a rough summary of how it went in a minuit.
First though, as I've moved on to finishing the Splay rig now, I should probably post up the most immediate problem that needs sorting out. For the bendy legs, I figured the easiest way to do it was to give up on the deformers and the complications and just make a load of skin clusters on the leg itself, and attatch them to some locators. I don't see why it wouldn't work, and it shouldn't have taken any time at all to test- but this is the problem:



As you can see, any attempt to select individual components on the leg results in selecting every component on the leg. Vertices, edges, faces- they all just select the whole leg. When I tried selecting vertices on the body, it did the same kind of thing, but it seems to have a droppoff rate as only about half the body moves. Now this looks good for the body, in fact I'll probably use it, but on the legs it's a problem. Does anyone know why it's doing this? You can see in the second part of the video, I've tried the same thing on a pure model with no rigging, deformers, or complications and it does the same thing, so it must be modelling or texturing related. Or it could just be really simple, like some setting I don't know about. Any advice on this would be amazing.

Other than that, splays not going to take much more time at all.

(d-di(x))+di=s

Ok I spent about seven hours today trying to find some good information on how to do a stretchy-limb setup for Dans character. Unfortunately I totally failed. There just doesnt seem to be any tutorials that work for me, and they all involve either ridiculous amounts of scripting or tons of stuff I just plain cant understand.

The first one I tried was this:
http://www.tutorialized.com/view/tutorial/Stretchy-Arm-Skeleton/26944

This one suggests using a duplicate skeleton with more bones in for smoother deformation, which turns out to be massively complex with tons of intricate constraints and nodes I don't understand just to keep the second bloody skeleton following the movements of the first. I couldnt even get this step right, let alone making any joints stretch. Here's what happened when I followed the tutorial and tried to move the arm:


I got similar results on both attempts of this. Maybe the tutorial works, who knows, but with my limited understanding of what I'm doing when I'm following it I don't have a chance of getting it right; there are just too many variables I don't know about that might be effecting it.

The second tutorial I tried was this:
http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/tutorials/character/c/stretchy-hand--2

This makes it look a bit simpler with no extra skeletons or anything, but has a massive section of scripting and expressions, but only for one side of the body. Even if I tried this it would be a waste of time because I don't know anything about scripting so I wouldnt have a clue how to get the other side of the body done.

The third tutorial I tried was this:
http://www.keegan3d.com/tutorial_view.php?id=7

This tutorial brings cluelessness to a whole new level. I literally have no idea whatsoever what any of it means but nevertheless I had a go at following it. This is what happened somewhere in the middle:



Unaware of exactly why my arm shrunk, I read further on to see if there were any solutions. Nope, it just relentlessly fills my head with nonsense and numbers, at one point proposing that the key formulae is (d-di(x))+di=s, but that we'd need to convert it to expressions.

Im going to give up for the day and come back to it tomorrow.

Character rigs

So the new terms started and everone's in production now. Dan and Phil of both approached me at the start of the year asking if I would be able to rig for their films "Polished Off" and "Splay", and the time has come for me to get on with it. I made a start on Jed from "Polished Off" today- he's a fantastic character and very true to Dan's style- he needs to be extremely flexible and bendy as he is something of a dancer. I've been asked if I can make his legs and arms stretch, so I will need to find out a bit about that before I start properly. Also the feet are modelled so that they curve upwards- this looks good so I don't want to request a remodelling, but as you can see it does mean the normal reverse foot setup I do isn't going to work this time. I reckon I can do all the movements I need for the feet through set driven keys, or I might be able to find an alternative. I got the reference curves and the spine setup today, but I will need to revise Sultans lecture from last year as I think it was a far better spinal rig than what I usually make!

I might ask for the hands to be adjusted so that the thumbs are in their more natural 'opposable' position, as this will help the skinning look more natural.

Apologies to Phil, I know you need your dudes rigged soon as possible but Jeds gunna take a whole lot longer so I started with him.

The other thing I have on my immediate agenda is to model Lonato on Red Rock. Lots to do this term, and I'm in my element in production phase, so I should be far more useful than last term.