Finished!

Apologies for not posting for a while, basically having done the bulk of my responsibilities for this project I have been working mostly on Gareths post production project. Rendering has generally been very smooth with little to no problems. Compositing was a dream, and generally post production has treated us well. We have it all exported now and ready for submission on Monday. I will see if I can find a way to post the finished video up here, but it might be difficult considering the file size and that it's in a quicktime format.

2 quick tests

heres the first one! open close and wide narrow on the pa system. Ok, this looks aweful, but thats coz it doesnt need to be stretched that much as its only for lip-sync. Still, better to be able to exagerate than not at all!

And heres the next one. This is just a quick test after having the idea that maybe if I used the shoulder setup for the spine it could be easier to animate with than the spline handle. (For future projects of course. (The shoulder setup being point constraining a locator to the bone and then parenting it to a handle.))

Let me know what you think!

PA system and problems resolved

Heres a quick model of the PA system that will be announcing feeding time at the Gorillas cage or something. I had the idea to do an open/close/wide/narrow blendshape slider for it, so we can get a fun cartoony effect for when the speaker system talks.

I also fixed the problem with the rig mentioned in the last post. Sarah helpfully sent me a suggestion via email which made the inheret transformation attribute apparent. This is the attribute determining wether or not the child of an object follows the parents transformation. I simply had to uncheck this box for a couple of things to stop everything transforming at different rates.

I've had some serious trouble moving the joints in the hips though. They needed to be higher up to begin with. Unfortunately repositioning them would mean detatching the skin and then re-binding, which Maya doesn't want to let me do because theres to much history on the skin. Dan Dalli showed me a very handy tool in the detatch-skin options box that means you can reserve the history, so detatching skin no longer means painting the weights from scratch. Another handy tool I found out about through this is the export weights tool, which means I could in theory remove the history from the skin and then re-import the weights. None of this helped my problem however. Alex thinks it's because I've detatched the skin and painted weights so many times now that the history is such a mess. The only way therefore to do it would be to delete ALL history, which would mean I would have to paint weights again, AND hook up the blendshapes again. Deciding I do not have time to do this, I simply moved the joints up slightly while they were still bound and put a little bit of extra hip influence on the back. It's a tad sloppy but under the pressure of time it's going to have to do.

For similar reasons we have decided to not bother with Pocahontis, as we think it's far more important to devote time to making all this work on one character at least pay off.

Problems

In response to Phils comments about problems with the rig, I set about trying to solve the easiest first. At least I thought It would be easy. Basically he commented about how there's no way to move the whole model in one go, so I created a Master controller which everything would be parented to. Yes everything moves when you move it now, but from the image above you can see the issue thats come up from it. Somehow everything moves completely out of sync, causing the body to deform when I don't want it to. I currently have no idea why.

As for the other problems, Phil mentioned, Im not sure how easy they are going to be to solve. The feet for example, I have already tried for ages to weight them so they bend properly, but they just don't want to bend without tearing horribly.