At this time, I've completed the ground to control rig system for all of the individual components, as well as set up attributes on the golem global to hide the numerous controls across the rig relating to that system. All of the normal maps for the major body components have been completed as well, so the only things left to texture are the horns, the chest opal, and adding the opal's glyph to the anchor stone.
Relating to textures, I've replaced all of the materials for mental-ray materials for better accuracy come render time. The horns and opal also have a surface light node plugged in to the mia_mat's additional color node, which allows the material to emit light.
Back on track, I did encounter a rather frustrating issue with the paint effects curves I am using with my rig. Due to me attempting to use a multiple component scaling system, where in the anchor stone and the golem could be scaled both independently and in unison with one another, the vine geometry would not scale properly along with the rig. It would shrink in diameter, which as one would guess, is not a good thing.
One fix I attempted was the wrap deformer adjustment, where in the geometry that is being wrap deformed onto another object is bound to a single joint, and that joint is placed in a group along with the main bind joint system of the rig. However, this lead to the double transformation problem seen in the lower half of the above image. Ultimately, I had to scrap the individual transformations and settle for the main global to do the scaling. This still left with the diameter issue. To get around this, I plugged in the scaling information from the main global control into a condition node, then took that information and plugged it into a multiply divide node to whittle down the data. Finally, I took the output and sent it into the pressure max node of the paint effects strokes. Once connected, everything scaled properly.
After that problem was dealt with, I moved on to adjusting the left wrist area again, as well as adding dynamic hair curves so that the finger vines could have a large amount of jiggle if the animator so wanted. With a separate control above the left hand stone, the dynamics, and the corresponding geometry, could be enabled or disabled at the animator's whim.
Relating to dynamics, I'm hoping to begin adding in some of the jiggle/jostle systems for the rig soon. The only things left to really set up on the rig that don't involve dynamics are the eye flowers, which have been started as of this post, and the tree on the top of the skull.
For now, here are the current textures on the golem:
Displaying the subtle light emissions from the horns and opal
Showing the adjusted teeth textures, as well as the adjusted vine colors.
