To start, Dana I would absolutely love to get in contact with Dan Philips. We could definitely use another hand with the rigging.
I've been talking to Jonathan Soto recently about what is the best course of action with the characters. One of the main areas we touched up on was cougar, what complications are left, and ultimately if he is worth pursuing. Right now the kinematics with the rig are working beautifully, but some of the deformations need more work, though I have been in way worse skinning situations in the past. We are looking into several tools that can help straighten it out, but we both agree we cannot get so involved developing the cougar rig that the human rigs suffer.
So I suggested we use some shortcuts where we can. I little while back I made the purchase of the education discount edition of the Setup Machine 2 (TSM2), and Face Machine with some money made off my Compositing Tutorial. At the time it was mainly to throw together a quick rig for deformation tests while I was modeling, but so far it is a perfect fit for the two human characters. Of course it would be a lot cooler if all of our rigs were built from the ground up, but I think doing this would give us the time to build a really nice and unique rig with the cougar that couldn't be done with a script like TSM2. Also from what I have gather from our meetings, people are really excited about animating an animal and want to see him in the story (a post on that hopefully soon).
Also I have other reasons for wanting to use TSM2. I am no rigger, I can't tell you the first thing about setting up a rolling heal, or FK/IK switch, but I am very well aquatinted with the hassles of skinning. In that regard, TSM2 is a miracle worker. It uses a smart weighting system that literally takes a week long job in Maya and turns it into an afternoon chore. And even after that week with Maya's default tools there is no guarantee it will look as good as TSM2.
The rig itself extremely stable and functional, but the skinning is easily the major selling point.
He is not quite finished yet, but I got this all done tonight. Also if we go this route, which I am heavily leaning towards, there are certain controls on the rig I think we should modify to make it easier for the animator.
The rig works independently of the software, so we don't need to purchase licenses on campus to use it in our production. Again I would love to hear everyones thoughts.
3 Responses to “Rigging Talk”
Since we want the ball to be rolling right when class starts i think the that the TSM would be the way to go. Easy to setup and easy to you. I don't know how it works with the buttons and belts and stuff but I am sure its easy to figure out.
Belts and buckles haven't been to hard. I just paint the weights in a way that doesn't cause any visible distortion to the hard objects on the vest. One area that is of concern however is how his weapon is going to work, especially with the wrist strap, but I'm sure we can work that out.
Now about the face rigs, we need to talk about what is the best approach. I mentioned possibly using the Face machine earlier, but have a look at this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6QSEo6aqao\
This to me looks even friendlier to animate with, though it doesn't have the same level of control. Again though, right now it comes down to time, if it takes too much time and research to build something from scratch with this caliber results perhaps we should focus our effort elsewhere. Just throwing out this as a possibility.
Opps, I meant focus our effort elsewhere and let Face machine do the dirty work.
I need to mention though, the face machine takes a lot more time to get right than TSM2 for the body. It's still faster than doing it all by hand, but getting all the skinning right is still a good size task.
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