Friday, December 20, 2013

Winter session wrap up

To close out the end of the winter session, I'll summarize the end results of both the curpigeon and my golem's work status thus far.

As a whole, I've technically built two rigs; the first being the 4 in 1 rig that took the whole of the entire session. The body types involved are the very thin to the fattest of the characters on the curpigeon project. It's not the most perfect rig in the world, as it still needs a low res mesh to be added so that animators won't have to fight with the rig doing calculations, and, unfortunately, some of the controls are stuck being inside the geometry, as the blend shapes made it difficult to move the controls into a better position, but overall the rig is a good success.
The second rig is for the fifth character names long beak, who's overal facial structure couldn't be added onto the multi rig. However, I simply stripped off the geometry from the main rig and reused it, with a bit of re-positioning. Do a bit of weight painting, and that character was said and done.

As to my Golem, I had to set it as more of a secondary project, but some progress was made. The constraint system for the stones was tweaked a bit more, so that the major pieces hold place fairly well, while smaller pieces have more wiggle room. I've also gone with using an IK system on the left leg's roots, so that the whole can be moved, or the roots can stick a bit when the leg is lifted up. I'll need to play with some influence objects relating to the vine curves, as a simple skin bind doesn't work as well as I would like.

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Progress for the week of November 17th - 24th, 2013

Golem

While using the nDynamics system, It can simularte a spring constraint to get that floating aspect I'm aiming for. However, the points on the geometry tend to expand dramatically if there is rapid movement. Upon further testing, I've found that it works easier to use the stock settings on nCloth mesh, rather than to use one of the presets. I had thought that using the concrete preset would be best, but something in that setting results in the geometry expanding. Currently, stock settings between 2 ncloth objects cause them to phase into one another, and get their vertices stuck. For the time being, I will use the soft leather preset, as it seems to give a fairly decent result. I'll adjust it more as things progress, since I'm still noting some give in the stone's forms.

Curpigeon

More refining and fine tuning on the rig, being sure that things bend reasonably when the bird is flitting about. I ultimately went with a simpler system for the neck setup, using a broken chain system to allow for stretching. Added some small tweaks to the eyebrow controls, having a larger catch all control to move them about.