Update as of August 12th, 2014

So a few things to note today. I've completed replacing all of the ground point controls so they stand out against the individual controls of a component. They now consist of two controls: one for the position, and one for the rotation.

I've also replaced the controls on the IK arms and their switches, so that they stand out more.

Same goes for the back vine controls closest to the body. One of the animators I asked to test the rig mentioned that the previous controls got lost in everything, so I vied for a pin shape with a bulky head that stands out away from most of the other controls.

Another error I found was that the left eye wasn't completely working. At some point, the connections were either left incomplete during the time I was preparing them, or a connection was broken amongst the blends during one of the repair sessions I had. none the less, it's been fixed and works just as the right eye does. There was also a nasty issue with the influences in the neck, where the vines, when in place, would overly move with the rotation of the second neck control. Add to this that some of the base points of the neck vines also had some lingering influences that caused them to shift when the neck was moved. This has also been remedied.

The last change is more of an addition. I'm testing out, visually, if adding some smaller vines onto the anchor would be more aesthetically pleasing.

Updates as of July 31st, 2014

So a few updates, but nothing radical.

The golem:

Still trying to figure this golem out overall. Modified the right arm so that it just runs on an SCsolver and some orient constraints, while the left arm uses an RPsolver, but has no real palm or wrist beyond the radius and ulna twist. Also added a new control to the stump, so that it can be offset a bit from the main body, though I'm contemplating making it a separate entity like the stones. Also streamlined the foot rolls into one node.

I'm honestly glad I took a semester away from this thing, because now I can look at it and see what can change to streamline things, as well as fix some readability in the controls.

Studio X

Things are wrapping up, and most everything that was worked on has been cleared. There was a minor hiccup with one file where the skin had been detached and re-bound by someone else on the team, leaving the weights in a poor state due to Maya's lackluster import weights function, but nothing serious enough to cause panic. A short time later, it was fixed, and I proceeded to make other fixes to the rig as a whole.

Beyond these, not much to report on. With the semester coming to a close in the next few days, work will shift back onto the golem with some more refinement and, thanks to a few friends of mine, animation testing.

Cheers,

Dan Rico

Updated activities as of July 26th, 2014

Still under several NDA agreements relating to all of the projects I am on, I will try to explain, as best as I can, what I've done in class thus far.

To start, the one project that wasn't under an NDA, was a bull character rig that needed fixing. Nothing too extreme, in that it needed some paint weight corrections, adding in some controls to replicate the muscles shifting beneath the skin of the shoulder, some pole vectors on the legs, and a better spine system. Add to this an adjusted tail control system and some controls on the testicles, as well as the loose skin beneath the neck, and that sums up the changes.


From here on, I can't say much about the projects, so I'll try to be detailed without revealing anything about the project.


First, this project is not a student collaborative project, but one from outside the AAU system. The initial idea was to create a proof of concept for a character, showing that it was possible to rig the character, as well as maintain the integrity of it's design and the film's aesthetic.

While the first pass proved the idea, it still needed work, so it's been a matter of making slow changes. So far, some attributes have been combined into one, such as the foot rolls, while other attributes have been given their own controls outside the primary rig. What makes this project a little more unique is that it required a duplicate rig to control a similar set of geometry, yet the geometry itself holds a different purpose compared to the primary geometry. The various portions of the geometry, on both the primary and secondary rigs, had to be somewhat modular in nature, in that they need to translate and rotate, regardless of the part of the body they were. Not a complicated task, at first, but due to the nature of the character, it wasn't particularly easy either.


The second project I was on, I ultimately had to leave due to the nature of the class and other projects that were stacking up that needed to be done. This project required a bird rig, which wasn't quite as difficult this time around, as I had built a bird rig on a previous project. Taking what I learned from that project, I applied it to this new rig, but in a much cleaner sense. There were a few revisions on some controls, such as a modified foot roll system, but due to some geometry issues, the project was delayed, ultimately leaving it to be given to another member of the studio x class while was assigned a new character that was ready to go.


The third, and current, project is currently the most complicated. It required three different rigs to be built, with the third being an accumulation of the other two. This one has proven to be the one I've learned the most from, in that having a maximum influence node enabled while weight painting can result in vertex weights flying to other influence object at the most inopportune times. Several of the limbs on the character are also a little more complex to work around, their function being snake like in nature. This piece, too, suffered delays in the modeling department, resulting in a large push recently that require the primary rig to fully functional for a test animation by the end of the night. Thankfully, that goal was met, and now it's just down to fine tuning and tweaks before being labeled complete.


On the side of all of this, I currently have an animator testing out my golem. Once things ease up in the studio X pipeline, I'm going to go in and start on the revisions they have listed thus far.

This is all I can disclose for now.

June 22, 2014: resuming activities

A new directed studies class, so a new set of journal entries. The current class is Rigging Studio X, which simulates the workplace of a company. For me, this isn't particularly new, due to previous freelance work. However, due to NDA documents, I cannot discuss what it is that I'm actually working on, unless given express permission by the parties helming the projects. The most I can say is that I'm currently on a conceptual project, and may soon be on another. If I complete a prototype of one rig, I may be placed on a previous project again and resuming some work there, though I may just keep tabs on it, as I'm on a higher rung in the hierarchy for the class.

As to my golem, I took a short break from really working to give my hands some time to recover, but I've made a bit of progress. Firstly, after a bit of feedback relating to the look of the ground controls, I'm going to test some new ones.

Mostly, I just broke apart the translation and rotation into separate controls, as well as making them circular to better distinguish from the boxes that normally control the various stones.

Beyond this, I did a few texture upgrades.

First are the horns. Using a combination of raw sapphire and smoothed ice from Ice caves, I created this look for them, as well as duplicating and crushing the mesh inwards to create a brighter core for the more intense glowing and light emission.

Then I added the final emblem design onto both the anchor and the opal chest stone. The rainbow effect of the flakes is still not quite there, since the reflective flakes are not randomizing the colors just yet. hey are only based on a sampler info node that connects to a color ramps facing ration node. Once again, I have a dual layer of geometry, though this time, the top layer serves as the surface for the emblem and some transparency to help bloke out the flakes in the blue veins, while the inner geo has a car paint shader to simulate the opal flakes.

Thats all for now.

Cheers.

Updates as of May 11th, 2014

Not much in the way to report this time around. I've completed adding in the remaining cloth sim components for the simulation file. It works for the most part, however, there is an issue with the proximity of all the nCloth objects to one another. With self collide enabled, the simulation time skyrockets, due to the collision thickness is in constant contact. To prevent this massive time lag, self collide was disabled for the time being.

Meanwhile, to reduce the overall dynamic file size, I tossed out all of the excess geometry that have no nCloth counterpart. I've also connected the cloth objects to a control to enable and disable the simulations, so that animators can turn on the dynamics when they wish to do so. I've also create a low res cage for the skull tree to help with simulations.

Everything is currently cached out to help out with calculations.

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.

Updates as of April 4, 2014

Been a bit of a spell, but here is the low down.

First up, the left hand dynamics had a rather nasty issue. When simulating on campus, the geometry moved as it should, staying connected to the body. However, at home, the geometry would disconnect and float off into space, before coming back. after a bit of investigation, I found that it was the dynamic curves that were being offset. There were three attempts to remedy this, the first was to bind it to joints, the second, being a blend shape node that linked back to a duplicate of the original curve, and then using an IK spline setup. Ultimately, it was the fact that all of the curves were simulating on one nucleus node, rather than being on either the same hair system or having their own nucleus to simulate off of. After a brief adjustment, this was remedied, and the setup worked.

All of this, so that, a dynamic setup could be achieved on the finger vines. This setup allows for jiggle when controlling the position of the vines, and can allow for complete freedom on the vine's part to move around.

After that bit of madness, I created a new control to influence the visibility of components.

This would allow animators to lessen the burden of the rig on their machine and the scene in question, as having everything active would be a hindrance.

I've also been readjusting some of the influences on the vine curves, so that some of the assembly control pieces, now fully functional, can move the vines themselves. below is a small example of this.

I've also gone in and separated the anchor stone from the golem, allowing the golem to move about freely, or be tied to it, if the animator so wishes.

Even more so, I've added an extra control to this so that the anchor stone can be flat out hidden, allowing the animator to work with the golem as a stand alone.

I've also worked out the eye system, where when the closed blendshape is active, it neutralizes the other blendshapes for when the eye moves about in the socket.

It was a simple matter of plugging in the close blendshape's output state into a multiply-divide node as the first input, then plugging in the rotational blendshapes into the second input state. For example, the closed state going into input 1X, and the forward y rotation blendshape into input 2X. As a result, whenever the eye is open (open blend active), it allows the rotational correction blends to work. However, when the eye is closed (Open blend inactive), it sets the 1X node to zero, cancelling out the rotation correction blends.

I have recorded a demo of the dynamic vine system on the left hand. The original curves are bound to a broken joint chain, allowing for the vines to be posed. The dynamic vines themselves can be activated or deactivated, as well as influenced by the original curve. This gives the animator the ability to make the vine either very stiff, or very loose and able to flop about.

On the topic of the dynamic curves, while working on a separate file for the golem, I ran into an issue with a script I had been using. Originally, the script was meant to create the vine curves, and could create the dynamic sets similar to those on the left hand. However, upon testing the script in a referenced scene, I found that, should an nDynamic nucleus already exist in the scene, it would attach the nHair system to that nucleus, and disrupt the rest of the script, preventing the new setup from being tidy. I had tried a simple fix, adding in a few lines to set it to a new nucleus, but this also had a drawback. If this modified script were to be run in a fresh scene without an nDynamic, nucleus, it would create two nuclei instead of just one. I'll probably need to experiment with an "if than" or and "if else" command in my script to prevent this.