Beast Rig WIP 2

Second WIP.

- Auto IK/FK matching/switching

- No-pop space switching for Hand IK controls

- Reset Rig function

- Select/Deselect All Controls

- Mirror Selected Controls/All Left to Right/All Right to Left

- Flip Selected/All Controls

Moving on to facial next.

Exclusive First Episode Clip of Clone Wars

IGN showing an exclusive first episode clip of the Clone Wars TV series. Our episode! :)

Cartoon Network trailer on Clone Wars

Starts airing in US on October 3rd. Eager to see how's the reaction to the TV series, which is what the studio at Singapore worked on. :)

Beast Rig WIP 1

Yup revisiting the Beast model again. This is part of the Muscle Rig project that I've been wanting to work on for quite some time now.

Body rig's completed. With Picker Interface as well.

- IK/FK Stretchy Limbs

- Ribbon Spine (Twist from both ends)

- Ribbon Neck (Auto-twisting with head rotation)

Here's the WIP:

Next up:

- Script for no-jump IK/FK switching

- Script for no-jump IK Hand space switching

- Mirror/Flip Pose

Activity Update

Been really busy recently at work with the upcoming new season and various rigging development and issues to attend to.

Helping a friend with his short film at home too, rigging his 5 main characters. Once they are done, I will be posting snippets of it here, subjected to his approval of course, which I'm sure he will have no problems with that. In the midst of rigging the characters, I have been organising my scripts and tools at home, and re-writing my auto-rig tool. By the end of it, I believe I will have a solid set of tools for my rigging needs.

And after that, it will be back to my to do list again:
- muscle rigging
- mechanical facial rigging

Long Overdue Facial Rigging WIP

Just realise I have not posted this to my blog yet. It's a long overdue video of the CGTalk Unofficial Facial Rigging Challenge. It's sort of an idea that I've been wanting to explore further: Mechanical Facial Rigging.

Clone Wars theatrical trailer's out

It's been a while since I updated this space. I have been really packed with lots of stuff all these while, from taking up new hobbies, to getting more and more responsibilities in my job.

On a side note, here's what I have been working on for the past 1.5 years:

















The theatrical release trailer of The Clone Wars is out! Movie's showing in US on 15th Aug 2008. Even though the parts we did are not actually in this theatrical release, it is still exciting to know that all the hard work we have put in is going to be publicly shown soon. :)

Watch it here.

If you are interested in the HD quality trailer, get it here.

Stay tuned for the actual screening of all the episodes on Cartoon Network starting this Oct!

Hyper-real Facial Rigging 2

Spent some time reading up and researching on the muscle line of actions on the face that are necessary and sufficient to achieve good facial animation. Build the facial GUI for these controls too. Here's a screen cap so far:

Hyper-real Facial Rigging

Gonna spend some time on the CGTalk Unofficial Rigging Challenge 2 on a hyper-real facial rig.

Did a few things:
- Some basic setting up of head/neck/eye joints
- Simple rigging of the eyes via aim constraints
- First pass skinning of geometry to the head, neck and jaw joints



Ideas:
- Since it is a hyper-real rig, I will be tuning my rig towards pseudo-muscle setup.
- Idea is to have a base head that is blendshaped to the actual renderable head, with all the rigging and extra stuff done on that base head. So the actual head will be "clean".
- Rig will be entirely made up of joints. Will add in some blendshapes if time allows.
- There will be a facial interface beside the face made up of curves for the controls, with on-face controls to fine tune the face if needed.

AutoRig Step 3 - Creating the actual rig joints

I re-worked the Joints Guide file a bit more after rethinking about the spine rig I'm going to do. Also changed a few naming conventions on the guide. Here's the updated file bipGuide.ma.

Spent some more time in rethinking the joint orientations of joints, how they should move and whether some joints are needed. Also noticed that the usual joint orientation functions, or even Comet's, could not really orient the finger joints well because of the way the finger joints are positioned. In this case, after the initial creation of the joints, I would need to go in and tweak the finger orientations manually.

Here's the result:


And here's the default Maya skinning on the model. Notice the extra shoulder joint provides a good default skinning to start with in the shoulder/deltoid areas. The upper spine area is not that flexible in real life bipeds, so only 3 joints are used for that area. More on that later.

AutoRig Step 2 - Placing the Joint Guides

The placement of joint guides is as equally important as creating actual joints itself. This is because the autorig system will depend heavily on the positions of these joint guides to create the actual joints, so any inaccuracy in this step will probably mean a rig that does not work that well, resulting in having to come back again and revisit this step. You might even need to go all the way to the skinning stage before you realise that "Hey, this joint is not that accurately placed".

So here's a look at some of the joint guides placement, and why they are placed in such a way.

Root/Leg Joint:
I usually switch to the Front View first for these joints to determine the frontal position. In this case, it was obvious where the joints should be placed due to the great model. In other cases, I will have to use my own discretion to determine where the root and leg joint pivot lines are. From the side view, they should be centralised in the body.

Ball Joint:

Knee Joint:
In hinge-joint areas, for e.g. knee, elbow, fingers, where joints have only 1 degree of freedom, I usually place the joint just slightly above the exact hinge position. In this case, the knee joint, from the diagram we can see that the joint is placed slightly above the hinge (dotted line). And also, offset them slightly from the mid point of the geometry towards the surface which stretches when the joints are rotated. I find that this gives me better deformations later on.

Spine Joint:
Nothing much. Just to show where the spine joints actually start and end.

Head/Neck Joint:
The head joint is placed at the bottom of the ear, and then moved slightly backwards. The jaw joint is placed at the position where the jaw is deemed to be pivoting at.

Clavicle/Shoulder Joint:
In the front view, the clavicle joint is placed at where the actual clavicle joint pivots.

An extra "shoulder" joint is used here in addition to the usual arm joint. This actually allows you to achieve relatively good default skinning at the deltoid area. When the arm is rotated downwards, the deltoid volume is more or less preserved. More on this during the skinning stage.

The arm joint is placed at where the arm actually pivots at, somewhere between the intersection of the chest and deltoid muscle.

From the side view, they are placed in the mid point of the geometry as well.
One more important note: I usually take great care in NOT directly translating any joints of parts where IK handles will be applied, for e.g. the arm-elbow-wrist area, and the leg-knee-ankle area. As can be seen from the guide, they are first created as a straight line. Subsequently during the joint guide placement stage, only the arm/leg joints are translated. The positions of the elbow, knee, wrist and ankle are all achieved by rotating the joints, and then
translating the joints ONLY in its local forward axis. For e.g. if the joint orientation was xyz (by default), translate it only in the x direction.
This is all to ensure that the 3 joints exist on the same plane, so that IK handles will not give you unnecessary slight rotation offsets when created. More on this during the rigging stage.

Autorig Step 1 - Loading the Joints Guide

Here's a look at the Joints Guide I'm using, and the Autorig tool interface:
I will always create a template for the joints that I need to place in the character, and save it off as a .ma file. So the tool will import in that scene file when I load in the Autorig guide. In this way, if I need any additional joints for placement, I can just go to that source file, add it in, and any subsequent loading of guides will have that in as well.

The names of the joints/clusters in the Guide are named as such:
SIDE_PART_GUIDE. For eg L_arm_GUIDE, L_leg_GUIDE, etc.
So that when I create the joints in the next step, I just need to script them to inherit the namings of the Guide so everything will be systematic and standardized right from the Guide stage.

The neck and spine are created as curves instead of joints so that I pull around the vertices to shape the curves to fit the body, and later on, create the chain of joints along the curves. More on that in the Joints Creation stage.

If anyone's interested, here's a link to the Guide I'm using:
http://www.4shared.com/file/14623944/bbe383f9/bipGuide.html

Next up, Joint Placement.

HyperReal Creature Rigging/Revamp of AutoRig system

Finally started to work on revamping the Autorig system I built about 2 yrs ago...

Planning to walk through the whole process of an autorig system, from creating the joint guides, placing the joints, creating the actual joints, and then automatically creating the rig for it.

Taking the opportunity too to work on the HyperReal beast rig, which I intend to put in my demo reel... Here's THE beast:

Even though it's a biped, the muscular structure are so well-defined, and the edge loops are modelled very well as well. By the way, this was from the HyperReal Creature book from Alias.

This will be good practice in terms of getting realistic deformations, as well as getting enough controls for realistic animation. Planning to research into achieving good deformations with joints alone, and building a muscle rig on top of it to enhance it further.

Mirroring Translation controls by Behaviour

I have been scripting lots of animation tools in my work so far, and one thing never fails to bug me. In my old rigs, I did not consider this right from the beginning, and even in the rigs the rigging department build in my company now, this thing still exist.

That is...

IK controllers, or rather, translational controllers that exist on 2 sides(left and right) of a rig, do not have mirrored behaviours when the same translation values is plugged into both. For e.g. a 5.0 translateX value in the left controller will move it in the positive X direction. The same value in the right controller will also move it in the positive X direction.

This problem is not that critical, but when scripting tools to mirror animation, mirror pose, etc, you always have to consider inverting the value when putting into the opposite controller.

I have always preferred having mirrored behaviour in the rigs, and it is more intuitive to the animators as well to see that the same animation curve is driving the opposite controller in the same way, that is, mirrored behaviour.

So...

To get mirrored behaviours in the translational controllers, I would
- create the left controller as per normal. Having a compensation group node above the translational controller.
- in creating the right controller, I would first create it in the same way as the left controller, apply -1 value in the scaleX attribute of the compensation node, then move the node to position it at where the right controller should be.

And now, the same translate values will create a mirrored behaviour on the opposite side of the rig.

This is definitely what I would want to see in my rigs from now on, but I'm not sure if I'm thinking along the right path to create rigs in such a way, so would be seeking more opinions on this...

Anatomy Practice

Been attending life drawing sessions in the company. These are times where I can get to practice on studying anatomy and just practise drawing it out.

Something rough that I did on a night few days back. Just suddenly felt like drawing something. This was drawn with reference to a picture in Strength Anatomy Training book by Frederic Delavier. It's a great book! Worth getting it for muscle and skeletal reference.

Saw another blog by Riven Phoenix teaching anatomy drawing. Great stuff! Check it out if you can:
http://the-structure-of-man.blogspot.com/

CGTalk Unofficial Rigging Challenge

This is what I've been working on recently:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=442120&page=1&pp=15

It is a good opportunity for me to further my skills and research into new methods and techniques. So I'm putting in quite a lot of effort into it. Hope it will turn out great!

Transition Phase

Alright long time no updates. Not because I've slackened. But new job, new responsibilities, and new environment take some time to get used to, and also to pick up new skills for my new job.

Nevertheless, finally got down to design and setup a mini pipeline in my home computer. Ways to automatically setup my personal tools, menu and development environment.

Collaboration with friend seems to have come to a standstill due to super busy schedule of his.

Next up, revamp of my rigging system. Wana get this done quick. May get to use it in work in later stages. Excited about it. :)

Shape Shifter Part 3 - Corrections

Long time no updates. Been busy with many things recently with regards to my job. So now that most stuff have been settled, I'll be back to my personal projects.

Firstly, some notes regarding the Shape Shifter tool. I realise there are problems with the Shape Shifter method I listed out in my previous posts. The corrective blendshape created using that method is in the joint's local space, which means that if other joints are moved other than that joint in question, the shape will go all wrong. That explains why my characters looks funny in some way even though I did do corrective blendshapes on them. Ultimately, I'm still back to using Comet's PSD tool.

Next, a friend of mine is in the process of conceptualizing a stylistic muscular character and he has already found a friend to model it. I'll be doing the rigging for it, and will attempt to combine cartoon rigging with some muscle simulation to maintain the volume. More details will be given when most of the things have been finalized. Really excited about it. Would definitely be a great personal project. Nothing beats having fun with a bunch of friends with common interest and aim. :)

Shape Shifter Pt. 2

I guess it wouldn't harm to share the workflow, since there are no replies...

1. Move the character into the problem pose.
2. Duplicate the geometry to be corrected (A). Duplicate it again (B).
3. Sculpt and correct (A) until the desired shape.
4. Apply both (A) and (B) as blendshapes to the original geometry. I find that using the "front of chain" option yield the best results. Then set the weight of (A) to be 1 and the weight of (B) be -1.
5. Move the character back to the neutral/bind pose. You should see your geometry having some wierd deformations. This is perfectly normal.
6. Duplicate the geometry again (C). Delete the previous blendshape created, and both (A) and (B) can be deleted too.
7. Apply (C) as a blendshape to the original geometry. Done! This will be the corrective blendshape you require, which can be driven via set-driven keys or using the poseReaders plugin by Michael Comet.

The script still need some cleaning up due to some workflow issues. I'll try to put it up ASAP.

Next on the To Do list:
1. Muscle rigging. Attempt to setup a full muscle rig using Judd Simantov's free cgmuscle plugin. Aim is to understand the full muscle anatomy of the human body and attach them to the correct positions.
2. Revamp my auto-rigging script. The first version was done quite some time ago, which ever since then I've been using it in production without much time to further improve on it. There are lots I've planned to improve on, so I'll definitely do this somehow.

Shape Shifter

Remembered that some time ago, I was reading about the way to do corrective blendshapes from the HyperReal series from Alias Masterclass. Even though there are already lots of corrective blendshape solutions out there on the net (Not forgetting the powerful PSD solution scripted by Michael Comet), I kinda like the approach from the class. It's simple, and yet does the job well.

I even scripted the workflow out into a simple tool, but not sure whether am I allowed to share this. Let me email the relevant people to see if I can do so.

Would be adding an additional tab to the tool for setting up set-driven keys easily. Might add in the workflow using the poseSpaceReader to drive the the blendshapes.