The goal is an exercise a day

To work off the rust and work my way up to something bigger. I think I'll do two more quick exercises and then work on something more elaborate. A dialogue or two character interaction.

And now for something completely different...

Trying to work off the rust with some asic animation exercises. Here's a Preston Blair style walk cycle with the Scout from TF2.

Moving forward...sort of.

So my rigging, modeling and weighting changes have carried over in the over-written reference file the rig file is pointing to, now on to grafting controls, set driven keys and blend shapes. After all the time I spend skin weighting and animating the joints to various visemes I think I'm going to try my hand at blend shapes. There just needs to be more information in the topology and more bones and more skin weighting done to improve the deformations and I could probably get with not doing that by creating blend shapes. Also I get to learn about blend shapes work in Maya.

Giving it 110%

Sporting metaphors really shouldn't apply to skin weighting but they seem to with Maya's weight painting brush. With the weight brush you can add more than 100% of value to a given vert. I've spent the last few days in the component editor correcting the values assigned to pretty much every vertice in the face. After a littler more tuning to the cheeks/checck bones and nasal folds I'll be ready to overwrite the Heavy_Reference file and move on to the Heavy_Rig file. I'm going to be grafting on rig controls for the face, set driven keys for the visemes and some blend shapes for visemes that are difficult to hit rather than adjusting the topology further and adding more bones.



















All in all it's coming along well, perhaps not as quickly as it would in Max, but it's getting there. By the end of the week it should be ready to animate with. Now it's just a matter of deciding which bit of dialogue I want to animate to...

Austrian Death Machine - Double Ahnuld

Austrian Death Machine - Intro to the Intro

Conan the Barbarian - The Musical

Predator - The Musical

I love the idea of animating one of the musicals but that's a pretty massive project, even just the Austrian Death Machine dialogues are kinda lengthy. Got time to think about it while I rig the face.

BWAH

The slow and dull journey of editing the weight values by component mode continues.




Weighting the jaw and the lips always takes the most time. Hopefully I can put in a good days slog tomorrow and get the weighting done, leaving just the set driven keys for the visemes and some basic controls.

Local rotation axes fun times!

Got a little ahead of myself with the weighting and forget to adjust the local rotation axes of the joints of the face rig. I didn't touch the local rotation axes of the joints on Valve's body rig, just what I'm totally hacking in.

Before:


After:


I'm not certain if it's wise to have the local rotation axes the same as the world or if I should have the y axis pointing towards the parent bone. I'm sure I'll find out when this explodes when I try to animate it. In my defence it's not an entirely uneducated decision, through my work I've had the chance to look at some professional face rigs and the local rotatin axes were the same as the world...



On to the weighting.