Moon blocking and bug fixing

Ive pretty much blocked all of the stuff that happens in his bedroom and some shots have had a really quick 1st pass on the animation - props moving and playing with overlaps so with that going well i decided to start blocking in the moon sequences. However in switching to the other rig/character mesh its back to bug fixing controllers that werent properly assigned and other things that had gotten messy with me trying to retrofit the rig i'd made for the other character mesh. this probably means a day of tweaking settings and weights. yay. so for now the to do list is as follows:

- establish why wrists dont work in fK
- wrist fK manipulator doesnt follow as expected
- Finger curl controls work for middle and end knuckles but not top one
- shoulder collapses in on itself
- correct influence on hands and suit details to prevent clipping

Star Test pt2

Been re thinking about how the stars on string will move and after talking to a couple of people ive given dynamics a go (with the help of charlie)
The meshes have been combined and turned into n-cloths, then the top vertices were selected > nConstrain > transform, which gives me the ability to move the string.
Next up is attaching this to the boy's hand...

Epic monday!

For a monday today was epic, really good feedback from the tutors about the film so far and what i can do to make it better
James also showed me how to get the fk/ik controls to show/hide according to the ikBlend setting so i ended up learning about if statements and the expression editor. All in all a good day.

if (rightArmManip.ikFkBlend > 0.5)
{
    master.ikManip = 1;
    master.fkManip = 0;
} else {
    master.ikManip = 0;
    master.fkManip = 1;
}

^^ that is the code making the pictures above work, basically saying that if ik mode is on show the ik controls and if its turned off the fk controls show.

the only flaw in it is that when ikBlend is set to 0 the handle disappears (as was the desired effect) so getting it to reappear is tricky.... so im gonna try assign this to the master controller so i can always access it (or just stick with the previous setup) either ways i learnt lots and have more i wanna try out (when i have time)

Stars and Strings

The last bit of stuff that needed rigging was the string so I could add in a slight sway as they're hung.... wasnt sure how i was going to achieve this at first and lots of joints and rotating each one seemed long winded but as I was setting up the character I found out about the "IK Spline Handle Tool" which pretty much worked like the Ik handles but meant joints in the chain would have a serpentine movement which was exactly what i wanted with the string. So i tried working out how i'd impliment that:

More research and testing occured:

Then i crudely keyed a quick sway just to confirm things were starting to work:

The bottom half is getting there and the top is close but needs adjusting as well as animating the star rotating/spinning on top of the side to side motion (which is blockout not animated).... Eitherways its getting there but still needs something

Final Controls

I realised at somepoints i'd be switching between fk and ik in the arms depending on what the kids doing but when i turned off the ik i had no controls for the fk stuff and showing/selecting each joint seemed a messy way of working. So i decided to create some manipulators to attach to the elbows and wrists to help me when im animating using the fk rig. but then there were LOADS of controllers everywhere. this was messy and looked horrendous. so i sat in the corner and geeked out and decided i would find a way to hide the new fk controls when using the ik ones and vise versa....
The master control (big yellow arrow-y type thing) now has two additional attributes they are as follows:

ikManip
and
fkManip

both of these were added as Enum attributes which let me create a show/hide option in the channel box. I then connected the appropriate controllers visibility to the new attribute so they now appear or vanish as required....

I also locked and hid the translate/scale attributes for all the new fk manipulators to avoid confusion - they are also a different shape so i can instantly tell which mode the arms are in. And all the manipulators are now coloured too - red for the left, blue for the right and yellow for anything in the middle...

 trying to work out how this would all work and connect up...

Re Rigging pt3

Was happy with the rig I made fri/saturday but it didnt have any manipulators for the fingers and having to select individual joints to keyframe seemed messy so after a shed load of experimenting I figured out what to do to make my own controls for each finger and it worked!

Re Rigging pt2

Re Rigging

After the crit on monday I realised how important the character performance was going to be, I thought keeping it limited was the way forward but it turns out its gonna be harder to do it like that which i dont mind but the setup machine rig I was planning on using doesnt fit what im after. Yes its a good rig and was useful for the tests but it needed a lot of persuading to do the things I wanted often with poor results so I figured rather than force it to work i'd go back and rig from scratch, therefore creating a custom rig for the character so it'll have what it needs and in setting it all up myself i'll have a better idea of whats going wrong later on. Probably not the smartest move seeing as ive not rigged a character before but here is the final (ish) rig, just need to add in some manipulators for the fingers to save going thro each joint individually and its there in full ik/fk glory... just hope the skinning goes as relatively painfree

Rocket Rig

step by step of rigging the rocket:
simple joint chain - only the left wing and ctrl panel are touched/folded/moved
added nurbs curve manipulators
tested smooth bind
adjusted weights/influence
final rig
stuff moved around

arms fixed

Altering the arms and fixing the weights so the shoulder area deforms correctly. Probably the most infuriating job so far but thankfully over. for now.

Feasability Testing 2: Cloth

Cloth Tests from Stacie Hawdon on Vimeo.

Testing possibilities of being able to animate clothing especially in the jump sequence, something to concider and develop further and look into nCloth and collision objects - making a more accurate inner body for the shirt to rest on and remving the edgind around the sleeves rather than its current extruded form

but the body was cool...

... and sticking in some joints and testing the mesh worked switching between fk/ik and not changing the weights so when i go back and tweak those it'll look nicer