Rig Tips

Vehicle-Terrain Interaction Demonstration

July 21, 2014 0 comments
Vehicle-Terrain Interaction Demonstration from Suchan Bajracharya on Vimeo.

A quick video on using Closest Point constraint
for vehicle real-time wheel-terrain interaction from one of my classes
at Puppeteer Lounge.

P.S. the suspension and lot of the vehicle rigs are going all over
the place at the moment, don’t worry, this is a work in progress file
and I just scrubbed through the timeline with dynamics enabled.

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Lounge in character modeling, rigging , animation and coding, feel free
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RigTip of the day (23-May-2014)

May 23, 2014 0 comments

#rigTip of the day!

Ever got stuck with mirroring the muscle weight with standard #Maya
skin weights mirror tool? Well mirroring weights in Maya is based on
the world space XYZ transformation co-ordinate of joint or influence
object. Maya muscle objects on the other hand is frozen in
transformation, as a result we are unable to mirror weights and usually
stuck with painting the weights on both sides.
Well for some cases this is a nice choice since we have asymmetry in
deformation but for the most the time, this is frustration to repeat the
same thing on the other side and a waste of time. Asymmetry can be
created with simple corrective shapes, no problem!

Well there
is a clever solution to this problem. Why don’t we just go on to attach
the influence objects to create a single mesh. Selecting left and right
influence nurbs object (muscle mesh) and attaching them to create a
single mesh! There you go, that was SIMPLE! All you need to do, is paint
the weight on the left and the mirroring works like a charm! Pheewww…
that saved us some time.

Hope this rigTip comes handy to you:)

If you want to learn more about Musculo-Skeletal deformation, check out these Mini-Workshops at Puppeteer Lounge!

rigTip on Transformation Rigs

April 28, 2014 0 comments

Recently I worked on a transformation rig (organic) where a guy
little cartoon character transforms into a big cartoon hulk like
character. The character I was setting up was not a creature but a very toony cartoon rig with a lot of cartoon like deformation functionality for body and facial system. After spending some time on R&D and brainstorming,”EUREKA”!

The technique lies in building 2 separate rigs, one for the small guy and the
other for the bigger guy. Both of these rigs (each of these rigs are laid out with all the features and deformation controls needed for a cartoony articulation) are controlled by a master rig. Think about it as a sort of IK-FK blending where we can intuitively blend from IK to FK and vice-versa. The target character model is then connected through blendshape from the 2 models (small guy & hulk) each controlled by separate rigs! Finally the new
model can now be transformed from a small guy to a big guy, seamlessly through a custom attribute 🙂

You can use this tip to transform a character into any other
character; biped to quadruped; cat to dog; man to hulk! Hope this helps…