With the slow progression of the bird models I focused more efforts on building my golem.
The base structure itself now complete, I've begun to add the neck vines and create a small base plate inside the chest to have the back vines stem from. Most likely, I will modify it to look like the underside of a tree trunk, and place the energy stone at its center, then build outwards to help fill the rest of the chest.
I was introduced to a potential Ivy generator, in the hopes that it could serve to build the golem faster. However, upon obtaining the program, I came to learn that the geometry becomes too dense, and there is no direct control as to where the ivy flows to, rendering it a potential hazard. Were I to use it, it could potentially bog down the system and make the rig neigh unusable, as the poly count could potentially skyrocket.
As to curpigeon, things remained quiet for the bird models, so I continued to refine one of the human characters a little more before moving to other projects over the weekend.
20th - 27th
Curpigeon suddenly became the hot project for me, as I was asked to create a rig for a different character than I had been originally assigned. Monday turned into mostly joint relocation, as I duplicated the joint system from an earlier rig, and set them to the new character.
Tuesday brought about some more coverage on nCloth, which will become something I use in creating the stone collision system on my golem. However, I will need to create a new, lower resolution of the stones in order for it to work, as the current poly count would probably bee to high for it to function efficiently.
Wednesday became a class once again focused on the new pigeon character, placing controls and setting orientations. Nothing too extravagant, though there was talk between Jason, Hector(a fellow rigger on the project), and myself of potentially creating a universal rig. In order for this to work, though, we'd need to be sure that the geometry on the other five birds could work with the most average form of one of the overall 6 bird characters. Still, the main rig needed to be built, and that was my focus for the rest of the day.
Thursday became a mad dash of weight painting and some experiments regarding a broken chain hierarchy, or as a classmate had described it, a ribbon system. This proved quite useful when constructing the tendons on the wings, allowing for some better deformation than just letting the arm and elbow joints control the geometry. It is by no means a perfect solution, as there are still folds in the geometry, but with some controls added, it should work well. Adding a joint system for the feathers is proving more difficult though, but I may have a solution.
The lead rigger on the project sent me a tutorial on the rig setup for the human character faces, recommending that it could be used on the pigeon's face. However, I found it can function more effectively as a joint placement setup for the feather joints. The only real difference is that I would skin the controlling curves to the wing's joints to deform it. With locators acting as place holders, plus some orientation constraints coming from the outer most locators inwards, the joints effectively held place, and the feathers along with them. However, the setup is not ideal, as it causes a double transformation that I didn't have the time to work out. The lead rigger sent an example my way of something he whipped up, using a combination of parenting and orient constraints. With some mild modifications to the setup, I was able to get the feathers to track more accurately.
