Hulkey Muscle Rig WIP 1

Done with the back muscles. Still some smoothing to be done, but just want to put these 2 side by side, with & without muscles to see the effects.

Hulkey Muscle Flex Test

Decided to play around with Hulkey again. Always wanted to play around with muscles more so decided to put some into him to see how much more can I push the deformations.

Built the skeletal structure using NURBS spheres. Similar to the one in Autodesk Hyper-Realistic series. Played around with rigging up the scapulas, and pretty happy with the results. Managed to achieve a little "sliding around the rib-cage" effect. I will put up a video on that later.

Muscles built using a simple muscle plugin with 4 attachment points and volume preservation.

This is the test to make sure no muscles flip during motion, before I even start skinning them:

Next up, the skin deformation itself.

Nice Hulkey Pose!

Really love this pose by Edward. AWESOME!

Also revealed some deformations to be fixed when I looked at the scene. :P

Hulkey Walk Cycle Test

A test by my animator friend. Thanks Barry!

Hulkey's all done!

Of course, still pending feedback and comments from my animator friends. Probably some bug requests as well haha.

Added various deformations using the poseDeformer plugin, still my trusted tool with regards to shape fixes. Shapes are sculpted mostly, but I did setup a separate rig with Maya Muscle skin system to provide the base of deformations. Took a short time to setup, but got really good results with it. Using that, shapes are duplicated off the geometry, and used as target shapes in the poseDeformer nodes. Simple and easy, yet the results are great and the rig still remained fast enough for Animation.

I'll probably compile a whole list of Hulkey's features as well as demos, but for now, I'll just leave you with a fun pose of him. :)

Hulkey Facial Rig Done!

Finally done with the facial blendshapes, hooking up to the facial GUI, and added the on-face controls for additional animation tweaks. Rig's getting slower though. Will spend some time to optimize it further, IF I have that time haha...

Next up, deformation tweaks for the body. GRRRRR!

Hulkey Anim Rig Done!

Completed all I wanted to do with Hulkey's animation rig. Ability to do no-pop IK FK switching and dynamic parenting is now implemented as a right-click pop-up menu instead of a separate character UI like I did for the beast.

I will be doing some feature demos later, but for now, here's the basic skinning deformation tests for Hulkey. You can click on youtube directly to see a higher res version. I believe the key to good deformations always start with good basic skinning before you can add on any other deformation features.

Hulkey Anim Rig WIP

Basic skinning all done. Still need to add some space switching elements before handing it off to any animators who might wanna try playing with it.

Maya Python - smSoftIK plugin node

Finally had my first try at Maya Python API. Surprisingly (because I'm so used to the C++ way), implementing plugins using Maya Python API is really fast and easy. Took some time to get used to it, but really loving it now. :)

Demo of the softIK plugin node I created over the weekend:

• Reduce the "popping" of IK rigs when the joint chain straightens
• Ability to adjust and animate the soft limit
• AutoStretchiness already built into the plugin node, thus saving a bunch of multiplyDivide, plusMinusAverage or condition nodes in the rig

All thanks to the theory shared by Andy Nicholas!
http://www.xsi-blog.com/archives/109

Hulkey Rig Wishlist

Body Rig

• IK/FK seamless switching (context menu?)
• Stretchy Soft IK (python plugin or rig)
• Multi-purpose math node (python plugin)
• Volume Preservation
• - Muscle plugin/joints
• - Skin wrap deformer (python plugin)
• > One skin wrap to multiple surfaces (NURBS or polygons)
• > Paintable weights
• - Pose Space Deformations
• > Rewrite poseReader in python
• > Rewrite PSD in python?
• "Sculpable" layered body deformations
• Simple secondary animation on hair using "delay" python node
• Cloth sim on pants

Facial Rig

• Adaptable Facial Rigging tool
• Pseudo "skin-sliding" joint-driven facial rig that adheres to director-approved shapes/look
• Facial GUI in Maya
• Sticky lips
• Take note of necessary controls under the eyes for more facial movement
• Pupil dilation
• Ability to shape eyelids (3 joints to control surface of lids?)
• On-surface controls? Direct face manipulation without controls?
• Teeth translation controls
• Remember to have upper lips down and lower lips up instead of just lips in shape
• "Sculpable" layered facial deformations
• "vert snap" deformer node to stick overall body to the face alone

Tools

• Rewrite AutoRig tool with interface (Mel or pyQT)
• Customizable Character UI (Mel/pyQT/HTML)