Extended Practice Character Creation: Rigging and Test Animations
Rigging
I then moved onto adding in the joints into the character which was a fairly quick process as I was following a set of videos provided by our tutor that we used last year to create our alien models so it was nice to get a refresher on this. I had to alter most of the joints in my model as he has a different anatomy to the alien or a normal human. This was fairly easy to adapt though, and I started with the joints in the legs, which are a lot shorter than normal so i will need to be careful when it comes to the later stages of binding him.
I then moved up to the arms, making the joints go down them so that they could bend in the right places.
Added the joints in the spine and then up the head as well so that it was controlled from the middle root joint.
I then joined some of the joints together so that they were controlled by the ones above, and ensured that all of them where controlled from the correct point.
I then moved onto creating the joints in the face, like one for the nose, eyes, brows and finally the ears so that they could all be moved individually.
Once all the joints where added in, I moved onto adding in the control points which where the areas that would be linked to the joints so that the animations can be added on.
I added in control points for all of the different joints in the body, making them in a place which was near or above the joint so that is was simple to tell which where which and then ensured that everything was labelled correctly as well. The process was fairly easy when following the videos as I made the controls pretty much the same, and merely added in controls for the extra joints needed for my model.
I then quickly colour coded all of the different controls so that the ones on the left where blue and the ones on the right red, then any running down the middle I changed to yellow so everything stood out completely. I then made the master control white so that it again stood out further.
I had now added in all of the joints and control points and it was ready to be constrained together so that the controls effected the joints.
I again used the videos to ensure that I was doing everything in the right order and way and started by constraining the joints that worked on an orientation basis, which meant that they are rotated in different directions rather than translated. This was pretty much all of the joints where a circular control was added in.
I then used an aim constraint on the eyes so that they stayed still but followed the movement of the control point when it was translated with movement, then added a point constraint onto the brow and the nose so that when the control is moved the brow or nose moves slightly as well to give more movement.
I then created IK handles in the legs so that they would create the movement of actual legs instead of just rotating or moving. This movement works really well for most models and recreates a really nice movement. There are a total of 3 IK handles in each leg to control the leg itself, the ball of the foot and the toe. This allows complete movement of the limb allows the handles to produce a natural foot movement.
I then ensured the everything was constrained where it was meant to be, before finally parenting the root joint to it's control and everything else was then parented to this so that it was the centre of the whole model, and where the main movement happens.
Binding
I then moved onto the binding section, which did prove the most difficult section due to random issues with the character becoming unbound from the rig when I was just about to finish it, and ending up with having to redo the weight painting again twice, but overall it went fairly smoothly beside this.
I worked methodically through the character's joints adding in the influence where necessary and ensuring that it was added in the correct place to enable the character to move in a thought out and human-like way.
Once ensuring that all of the joints where correctly influenced I wanted to do a quick test to ensure that all of the parts of the body moved correctly, obviously at this point the eyes weren't joined so they did not follow the head yet.
All of the movement was looking good and I finalised the movement on the feet further to ensure that there was no stretching of any of the limbs in weird places or that the character did not move in weird and unpredictable ways.
Custom Attributes
Once the weight painting was finished I moved onto adding in some custom attributes to make the model appear more life like in the way that it moved, by adding in features like like the hand being able to go into a fist and the heel of the foot being able to peel off the floor to allow for the most natural foot movement in a walk cycle.
I started by first creating all of the attributes and naming them correctly so that they could be recognised in the side panel and I knew what each of them where going to do. This was the easy part before moving onto generating the movement.
I then moved onto actually creating the movement of the character attributes for the feet so ensuring that they were in the correct groups so the pivot point could be moved and then ensuring that the groups contained the movement instead of the rest of the rig so that it produced it separately.
I then went through all of the movements getting them right from the starting point to each positive and negative value so that the foot could move in two different directions from the starting point, but this was only necessary for certain movements like with the ones that twisted.
I then created the fist on the hand by curving the fingers around the thumb and tucking it in, it's a very basic looking movement but because you never actually see it that close, only get an idea of it. The hand curved around nicely and this was simple to create, making the fist shape look very good in the end.
Finally I went back and ensured that the movement of the joints all looked natural and there weren't any areas that stuck out at all in a weird manner so I was very happy with the overall look to it. I think that the character works well and as you will mainly see him from the back, he looks very appealing and stands out well.
Test Animations/Cycles
I then moved onto creating some test animations and cycles that I could recreate for the final outcome. I think that the overall movement of him will be rather hunched over and he will have a bit of a hobble, but once he has taken some energy he will stand a bit more upright, hold his arms up more to run and generally look more enthusiastic so I wanted to ensure that the animation and rig was going well enough that once I started my final animations he could be manipulated in whatever way without any issues.
Before animating I first took some video references of the kind of movements he would be doing in the test animations, so I recorded Stuart Brown doing the movements for me in the way in which I believe Keith would have done. I first did the four basic movements to test the rig; walk, run, jump and idle to ensure that I liked the look of the character before I moved onto creating all of his movements.
Animation Frame List:
With a one second pause in between all movements.
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