Tuesday, December 20, 2005

A Taste of Things to Come

The studio I work for recently won the bid to do a demo for a client involving four characters; three people (biped), and one animal (a quadroped, but with the ability to sit upright like a biped). Naturally, these will all need rigging, and this project allows for some development work in which I plan to amalgamate all of the latest rigging technologies I've been practicing.

These technologies include an IK/FK leg that can stretch in both IK and FK modes, optional twist joints, and the ability to seamlessly blend between the two systems with stretchiness, orientation, and twisting all staying intact. Likewise, the arms will feature the same IK/FK blending, the same stretchiness attributes for both IK and FK, and optional, but highly recommended, twist joints. Of course, translations along the joints, rather than joint scaling, will be used to produce the stretching.

The latest technology I've recently perfected is an Spline IK-style spine. I say "style" because it actually doesn't involve an IK solvers. Instead, a curve is created, and pointOnCurve nodes are generated along the curve and joints are then parented to, and aimed at, the various nodes to create a spine chain. The CVs on the curve are then clustered, constrained to controls, and voila, you have a stretchy spine system which is not only faster than Spline IK, but also more powerful. In my particular design, the spine is able to twist from the base or the top, while Spline IK is onl able to twist from the base of the spine.

To reduce the amount of re-rigging on the IK, FK and Blend joint chains, the hands, feet, and any other extranious joints will be parent constrained rather than parented directly. This also allows all the bindable joints for the smooth skinning to be grouped in the same location. This makes it a no brainer as to which joints should and shouldn't be bound since all will clearly be marked with a BIND tag in their name.

While it is possible to rig each character from scratch, I feel it will be a good idea to create a "character kit", a set of MEL scripts to automate many of the major steps in the process. This guarentees a greater degree of consistency, allowing any changes to the rig to be done more easily, and making the control system more predictable for the animators.

There's more to discuss, but I don't want to list it all at the moment, incase I don't have time to implement it all. This post has basically been a list of the key components I'm determined to include. Be sure to stay tuned as I develope this rig, I plan on posting videos of the various parts in action, along with brief summaries on how they were made.

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