updates as of April 24, 2014

Not as much to report, given the large span of time. To start, I did create a brief test animation relating to the rig as it stood on the 9th of this month:

Nothing amazing, beyond showing all the components running in conjunction with one another. No dynamics were set beyond the vines at the time of the assembly.

However, while testing, I did discover an odd occurrence relating to the head. When it was set to it's ground locator, the control on the main rig would still have influence over the rotation of the head tree, and that of the eyes. After digging a bit, I had concluded that the orient constraints that were running were broken in some way, so I removed them. In their stead, I constrained the eye controls to the actual joints that bound the skull geo, and had a direct connection from the joints on the main rig onto those that bound the skull tree.

There was also a second issue relating to the two wood plates on the golem's back, where I had unintentionally broken the parenting setup. Where I had intended them to switch between their ground locators and being parented to the chest's center stone, they simply stayed parented to the stone, and would be immobile while set to their supposed ground locators. Diving into the outliner, I corrected the problem, in that I had removed the double parenting, and created a fresh parent constraint to the proper components.

Past this, I decided to revisit the vine script I had made a while back. After building the finger vines, I decided to do a little revising regarding the setup, ultimately ditching the command to look up the Ivy brush that exists in the paint effects, and using the default one that comes pre-loaded into the scene. I'm going to try and combine the two halves of the script, in that it would ultimately mimic the finger vines, but with a little more control regarding the shape of the curve before running the dynamics.

At this time, I've created a separate dynamics file for the stones and wood components, allowing for some easier testing in a lighter scene. However, it's difficult to determine how everything will interact, so the file is referenced into an animation scene.

Here, using the gray wireframe to indicate the original geometry, I can see that the hand stones and the left leg stones should be loosened in their constraints, though to what degree is difficult to predict, as the scene, with everything running, becomes heavy to simulate. It's pretty much trial and error at this point.