16 April 2014

No Spring Chicken....

A bit more progress on the digging character, this time he's rather worryingly doing the chicken.....



This is really just an exercise to test the bind on the character but it was peculiar enough to make me render it out and present it as part of the workflow of this project.

I downloaded the mocap data from the Carnegie Melon University database.... it's pretty extensive and most importantly it's free for anyone to play with!!! The data hasn't been cleaned up or adjusted and, as you can probably see from the rendered animation, I've not bothered doing any of that for this test as I am just checking the bind.

Initially I wanted to rig the character with IK, FK and a third skeleton that could be controlled by mocap data but I have decided to forgo the IK and FK parts and have opted to have only mocap driving the main body of the rig.I did still bind a version of the character with a manual rig and IK FK switching on the arms and legs.... I will probably only use it for posing still renders rather than animation but it was a good refresher exercise in rigging and binding.

The hands and face of the character do still rely on manual keyframes which, in this video I have not demonstrated but please believe me... they work. I have used a couple of simple lines of MEL script to drive the mouth and the eyes, it uses noise over time to drive the rotation of the joints... I felt that the lack of movement ni the face of the last video was a bit unsettling... I suppose that in it's own way this new video is equally, if not more unsettling but it's not because of the face being motionless.

The next stage for this build is the blend shapes for the facial expression and geometry correction in extreme poses.

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