Vaiva's First Expressions

These are Vaiva’s first expressions , having just finished rigging. :]

 

To create suitable rig for Vaiva it was essential to think about her performance a lot. This guided me through rigging process. It was very clear what type of expressions she’d need most for example, snarly lips, squinty eyes. On the other hand, a very gentle and motherly smile too.

 

 It has been nearly 3 weeks of rigging Vaiva. Most of the time spent preparing the character for lip-synch and facial animation. 

I am in currently researching animation techniques (Animator’s survival Kit of course) , and references for animation . Also, filming action for animation reference. Soon to come will be a test walk cycle animation.

Laume's Character Rig

For a good week I was busy with creating rig for Laume. She has a fairly standart character body rig. The only exception being her chicken-like legs: her toes have more functionality than a real human's leg:  behaving more like fingers.

Her face is the complicated part. It has now over 60 controls for tongue, eyebrows, cheeks, lips, squinting ande else. She now can  blink, her mouth is also in place and working but the daunting task of rigging  hasn't finished yet, for I have still to make blend shapes for lipsynch and general expressiveness.

Unfortunately while rigging, something must've broken links of my textures and because I have combined my body parts it will ask for me to do a carefull face by face selection to reaply textures again , so I wasn't able to upload nice renders of her posed and texture. 




 

Development of WW: Character Rigging and Texturing

This week main focus was to finish rigs for both of the characters. The soft modification in the good wolf required some fixing, because some parts were collapsing as he is doing general moves. This was solved creating pose deformers.A very useful technique as I found it and am glad we were taught how to use it in our maya classes .

 For the evil wolf , his shield-like structure was asking for a disparate type of movement for his parts. I have created a pre-set animation for all 4 of his legs, so as they move an illusion of the separate muscles moving is suggested.

 The other part of the focus now is the texturing. Here is the doll’s colour pass finished.

 

I also used ambient occlusion bake-in and settings to quickly shape the outlooks. This technique, used for the first time, seems thoroughly useful now.

 

 I have started some developments on the evil wolf’s texture. The tweaked mental ray shader already it has 60 percent of the desired looks, so I’m quite excited what can be done further when all the passes will be solved separately

Good and Evil Wolves Rigs

For the good wolf to work I've followed a fairly basic quadruped rigging. It looks to be enough for the type of animation in The Wolves Within, but few fixes with pose deformers wouls still be needed. Also still waitting are blend shape models for the facial animation.

For the Evil Wolf I followed the base quadruped rig too. However I am pretty sure to go and set-animate the parts and look into some addition of other rigging solutions for finessing of the working of evil wolf.

Ready to Go

Finaly, after week and a half Bird's rig is solved!

I have to admit, the rig now is really comfortable to use with lots of freedom for Ivan's changing way of movement (especially concerning walk cycles)
Also, I'm happy that it was possible to have both Bird and Bird-lantern working under single rig so it is all unified and simplier for that reason. 

Ivan's rig was constructed differently from typical character's one as he has some unique constructions. For example, to make his legs work, which are much like a contracting/expanding telescope, a  piston's rig was combined withthe usual leg IK rig . In general, reach was for effective yet simple way of controlling Ivan in his animation. 

Next in the pipeline is test animating the bird to get use to controls and to solve his basic walk cycle together with getting dope sheets for animation ready.

Ivan's Rigging problems

No exception this time: rigging = problems.

The geometry falls of the joins as well as when bird is moved, neck moves  twice the speed of entire body.
I do suspect where those problems are coming from ( perhaps because of the constraints and negative values somewhere, also  double parenting) . But frankly, I'm not that well acquainted with rigging and can't seem to fix these problems. The system, though much clearer, is still too confusing to me :/ very sad, but true.

Hopes are these are relevantly easy problems and I wouldn't have to rework body rig, as it is all pretty much finished and would be ready for animating this week...