Sarah's BA Blog: Updates

I can say without question or concern i have learnt more this year than any other year...

i will copy and paste this sentence every year following this one without doubt!

So to business and by gum has it been business. Character setups are crazy and still murky waters in terms of fully understanding all the necessary this first, parent that next, no this is not the way blah blah blah BUT i challenged myself to pursue this further than i ever have before and to see it through so we had decent rigs with proper controls etc.

This last week can not go without credit to the following person: Adrian Smith

Who spent the last week skinning not 1...but 2 of our characters. This guy is not (no offence) an animator but a broadcaster, who one day i decided to let loose on Maya and teach him the odd thing here and there...a bit of modeling, a bit of animating, a bit of rigging, render layers and what have you. Now he's pursued his knowledge of skinning and (somewhat embarrassingly) overtaken me on that one.

"Hahahahaha" i hear you say....maybe? However i personally think whoevers best for the job should do it and hey...he was better. The week was mostly live screen sharing until 4am with us sending the model of Lady Gnome back and forth. Me adjusting the arms and fingers and Ad doing pretty much everything else including fine tuning the fingers and arms i did. It really does highlight the collaboration between animator and rigger, as every single movement needed was discussed and worked on in the weights. Any issues that occurred during the skinning such as the teeth receiving no influence, the hair pulling the teeth out of its geometry the flower flying around the screen of its own accord was left to me to problem solve and generally trashing one version of the model until a solution was found and adding it to the final whilst Ad fine tuned the weights.

Do not dismiss who you may learn something from as from his knowledge of weights I've learnt how i can rig my characters better and even model my characters better for the future. There is nothing drastically wrong with these (i will fight my corner here) but knowing i can do better in the future is something im certain of just from what ive learnt here.

Clyms weights of Hero came through on the Thursday but unfortunately not up to scratch so were redone by Adrian and completed Saturday. The benefits of having the director there to discuss every movement needed is key and was how we were able to get Hero the way he does.

My thanks also to Mu Li

who solved the button not wanting to scale issue with his mel script. Thanks for taking the time to sort that out its much appreciated :)

Thanks also to Alex Hulse

for all your help assisting me with rigging and helping me understand it a lot more than i did.

All i then had to do was add the facial control panel and scale the characters accordingly. These are now available on the adrive account and our animators have been notified and can start work immediately.

A look at Lady Gnomes facial control panel....very pleased with this. All locked off and limited accordingly and fianlly parented to the master control so it will follow the character nicely.

the problematic hair geometry...when you move the hair locators it warps the flower. The flower recieves no influence from anything though and you cant seem to paint it out. I will probably need to add a joint in and add influence to solve this.

attempting some painting weights with Lady Gnomes fingers....

checking it against all the hand attributes...

Painting lady gnomes textures....

backing up EVERYTHING!!!!

Lady Gnomes painted textures require subtlety so we dont see the seam at the back.

the completed Hero gnome rig! werhey!

fingers shouldnt ever be able to reach this lengths of stretchyness

awwww look at the lil puddun'

scaling hero via the master control...

...one of his buttons is problematic and seems to not want to go with him!?!??! it has the same parenting and weighting as the other button so im stumped here!?