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.