After having a read through the advanced rigging section in Hyper-Realistic Creature Creation, it seems as though creating a low-rez control rig set to drive the high-rez bound rig is going to involve a serious amount of work relating to complex MEL scripts. I'm not sure if I have time to figure all this out, so while I'm holding this in mind for something I'd ultimately like to be able to do I'm lowering the priority of doing it for this project. I want to do something really good, and to that end simpler is usually better. Plus, the reason this technique is often used in industry standard rigs is simply that industry standard models often have a very high poly-count. (Particularly with hyper-realistic models, which is what this book is about.) Therefore this technique is perhaps innapropriate for the nice simple cartoon models that we have in mind for our project.
However, in trying to find a simpler way to do the low-rez to high-rez switch, I came across a golden nugget of wisdom in Mastering Maya 7. Refer to the problem mentioned in this link to a rig from last terms project:
http://gringoarts.blogspot.com/2008/11/bouncy.html
In particular the bit that says,
"Basically what I still need to do is sort out the orientation of the wrist joints, as at the moment they do not correspond to the rotation of the hand controllers. You can still rotate the hands, but its not very user freindly. "
Well I never did get that problem solved, as sorting out the local rotation axis of an individual joint is very fiddly, and even then it's very difficult to get it to be exactly where it should. However, the technique explained in Mastering Maya 7 will prevent this problem from occuring. The technique is to use EP curves to blueprint where the skeleton will go before actually building it, with the edit points being where the joints should go. This means when building the skeleton you can simply snap the joints straight to where they should be, saving the process of re-adjusting the positioning afterwards. (This is relevant, as it is at this stage where normally the joint orientations are knocked out of line.)
Handy.
However, in trying to find a simpler way to do the low-rez to high-rez switch, I came across a golden nugget of wisdom in Mastering Maya 7. Refer to the problem mentioned in this link to a rig from last terms project:
http://gringoarts.blogspot.com/2008/11/bouncy.html
In particular the bit that says,
"Basically what I still need to do is sort out the orientation of the wrist joints, as at the moment they do not correspond to the rotation of the hand controllers. You can still rotate the hands, but its not very user freindly. "
Well I never did get that problem solved, as sorting out the local rotation axis of an individual joint is very fiddly, and even then it's very difficult to get it to be exactly where it should. However, the technique explained in Mastering Maya 7 will prevent this problem from occuring. The technique is to use EP curves to blueprint where the skeleton will go before actually building it, with the edit points being where the joints should go. This means when building the skeleton you can simply snap the joints straight to where they should be, saving the process of re-adjusting the positioning afterwards. (This is relevant, as it is at this stage where normally the joint orientations are knocked out of line.)
Handy.
Refer to the image for a visual example of what I mean. The two joints on the left have just been placed. As you can see their orientation is in the correct position (x pointing towards the child joint). The joint on the right however has been moved. When you move a joint the orientation remains where it was when it was placed. This is why it is out of line.
(You might have noticed that on the post for the old blog I was going to attempt the low-rez/high-rez switch then as well. In case you were wondering, that particular tutorial had no information on it at all, which is why it never happened.)
No comments:
Post a Comment