Asking discussions with Yaniv, his workload on Red Rock has increased so it didnt seem fair to expect him to rig his character considering he has a whole character to model for his other film. Whilst i could copy over the rig used in Macho Gnome, there were a few niggling errors and missing attributes and general things i wished to improve upon, so i decided to start from scratch for these two and would alter one accordingly to fit the other model.
The rig is on a seperate layer to the controls and the rig is switched to unselectable so theres no chance of an animator moving about the joints.
all locaters are serperated on their own layer which has been labelled unselectable. All controls have necessary translates and scale attributes locked off so they cant accidentally be moved about. I've changed the knee pole vector constraints to curves as it means we wont have to hide them when rendering out...annoyingly i cant believe i forgot this when following the rigging tutorial for Macho Gnome. Overall this is not too dissimilar from the last rig, but is just that bit better, slicker...well...to me it is.
Reverse foot. Though our characters should 'plod' when animating its necessary to have this level of control over the model otherwise the animation would look primitive.
A quick outline of the rig...a couple more bones necessary to distribute the weight for the face/back and sides as noted by Matt for my last rig of Macho Gnome.
creating the IK Spline...hopefully this wont need to be removed (Daves showed me where you can remove influence from the cluster deformers) so hopefully we wont have to improvise with the weights this time.
Test out the leg bending with the added root control.
This rig has the added toe flick attribute, thanks Dave for showing me how to create this.
The fully complete rig complete with FK arms, IK Spline, Set driven keys for the fingers, root control and a host of foot attributes as well as the suggested rib, face and tummy bones to help distribute and ease the painting weights later on.
A quick smooth skin bind test to see how things are looking, moving, deforming. Already were getting some really nice animation stances without too much deformation here in this walk pose. This should literally need a slight adjustment in its weights.
Ah now i can really see the benefits of adding the tummy and face joints to the rig as poses like this now mean there is less deformation occurring in the face. Hopefully it should make painting the weights a quicker process.
Slight explosion going on here when rotating the arms however this just requires smoothing out of weights, shouldn't be too much of a problem.
and a final look at the set driven keys, again nothing massivley deforming here, the main area that will need focusing on is the flap of skin between the thumb and fingers which is affected by multiple joints. Apart from that, no serious issues here, so I'll be waiting on Yanivs blend-shaped character before I can bind/paint weights for.
Lady Gnomes rig requires a few variations on top of this. For example, myself and Matt decided she needed joints placed within her hair so that any collisions with her arms when she's clapping can mean the animator can simply move the hair away or react to her hands clapping. We tried removing the hair but she lost her look that we liked so much.
p.s my easter egg...another Wilf sent my way...its beginning to get creepy now.
