Update

Hello all,

As some of you may know I recently went for an interview with Travellers tales as a Junior Technical Animator. Things must have went well as I received a phone call informing me that I got the Job :D. Suffice to say I have't had much time to work on my portfolio as i've been dashing about like a mad rabbit trying to find accommodation near Manchester.

Anyway i'll try to keep this blog updated with various bits and bobs, however until I get a flat sorted out the blog is probably going to be a little sparse. :/

Thanks

Mike

More attributes and mel

Hi all,

Last week I added more controls to the rig, in particular the foot controllers. Now each foot has a banking attribute and a switch that determines what controller the foot follows, eg the world or the hips. Iv'e also been working up some old Mel scripts for an interview and as such completely overhauled my animation export script. I had originally made the script in June and on revisiting the script I realised I could do the same function with less code.

Anyway here are a few screen grabs of the rig, and I'll try to post up the mel as soon as it's complete.

Cheers

Mike

Update - Unity

Hi all,

Well I've continued work on the rig and decided it was time to import it into another game engine. So I downloaded Unity and tried it out. Initially I hit a couple of snags when importing in mesh animations but quickly realised that the root joint (in this case 'jnt_Root_slv') needed to have skin attached too. Needless to say as soon as I added this joint as an influence the animations imported correctly. :D

So the difference between character rigs imported to the Unreal and those to Unity is as simple as skinning the root joint of the slave rig (well.... when exporting as a .mb or ma that is).

When exporting as a .fbx the problem becomes a little more complicated. The root joint, from what I can tell, needs to have skin attached. If no skin is found on the root joint or node then the mesh will export with no skinning! The problem with my file at the moment is that the root node is a group which I have constrained to a scale attribute in the master rigs heirarchy, which allows me to scale the character rig.

The main solution I found was to set the main scale to 1 and uparent the slave rig from the scale group I had created, as soon as I did this the rig exported correctly animations and all. So for future rigs to be exported as .fbx i'll be sure to set the character scale correctly before rigging and weighting the character...... The lessons we learn :P

Thanks

Mike

IK FK controls

Hi all,

Well after a discussion with Mike yesterday i decided to add IK FK controls for the characters arms. There were a few hicups along the way, Maya apparently doesn't like to keep the rotations of groups or nurbs curves when frozen and immediately reverts back to its default LRA (local rotation axis) when done so. This meant when orient constraining joints there was a massive offset applied to compensate for the difference. and when you blend between constraints with different offsets the joint chain rotates all over the shop.

So the solution to this was to use joints instead of groups or nurbs controllers to orient constraint my fk chain. I then parented these control joints to the control curves and walla, no flipping or massive offset values to deal with :D

Anyway the new rig is up on my site, so feel free to have a looky.

'Monk Rig'

Cheers

Mike

Rigging

Hello all,

Been spending the last two days rigging a model for a friend 'Mike Doig' intended for use within a game engine. Got the Rig up and running and was quick to test it in the UDK, all seems to be fine (touch wood). Might add some extra controls to the rig later on next week based on my meeting with Mike Tomorrow, but for now it's a wrap. Anyhoo here are some screen grabs of the model in the UDK and Maya.

You can download the rig from my site if you fancy a play around,

Monk Rig V0.4

Thanks

Mike

FK IK Rig (legs)

Hello all,

Ive been spending yet more time working on this simple bipedal rig with an ik fk switch for its arms and legs. Iv'e set up a simple node based condition that allows the user to switch between the ik and fk joint chains.

Basically i initially created three joint chains for each leg arm etc and named them either fk, ik or skn. The skn chain was then orient constrained to both the fk and ik chains. I then created a specific controller for each leg or arm called for the FKIK switch. This controller was given an attribute in the form of an enum that allows the user to switch from FK to IK mode. In the hypershade I connected up the conditional node to the FKIK switch controller.

When the user switches from fk to ik mode the conditional node sets the values for the skn chains orient constraints to follow the respective chain.

Ill add the switch to the arms next and then focus on making the transition seamless. If anyone has any questions please feel free to contact me at mail@michael-cummings.co.uk

Thanks

Mike

Update

Hi peeps,

Just a quick update, I've been spending the last while on a few personal projects as you might well have guessed from my last post. Anyway I was asked to do some rigging for a friends animation so I've been concentrating on that. Due to confidentiality I can't really disclose the project, although as far as I'm aware it's being created mainly for his own portfolio.

I feel there are many positive aspects for accepting this project; it helps me further develop my Maya skills, gets me working as part of another team and above all it's something fill the time while I seek full time employment.

Anyway that's enough blethering for one day. I'm off to Amsterdam tomorrow to attend the IBC, an international convention featuring many high profile software developers. The lengths we go to to find work :P

Thanks

Mike