Technical Art - V

As I mentioned before I focused my attention to rigging in the past weeks and as I've already set my eyes on an ambitious script I have decided to keep the scope reasonable and keep using the practice model I choose to start with during the labs:

Wireframe render of the model

The model topology is quite good and even though the model could lend itself to a very rigid type of deformation I will pretend the model is actually just a placeholder for a human like character (so that further thing could be explored in the future such as animation and skeleton re-targeting). I think this fits nicely my field of specialization since by researching I have seen that some companies actually employ a base model as a template for the most common animations.

Solid render of the model

Technical Art - IV

In the past days I've been researching what kind of scripts might be helpful while animating and one of the things which I found more tedious to do is selecting and manipulating joints and control shapes.

While browsing for custom scripts developed by professionals I stumbled upon this picker tool which looks very interesting:  

As stated from the description in the website: abxPicker provides artists, animators, and character TDs with an intuitive drag-and-drop interface for creating and using character control Interfaces. Using drag and drop, you can create, position, resize, and edit buttons to select and animate character controls.

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This tool enables the user to create their own pickers through a drag and drop interface and then save those interfaces to be reused later on. I believe that the tool proves to be very useful but I want to research this concept further and maybe find a way to automate the picker creation process so that the user will only have to choose which part of the model has to be "captured" and all the information regarding joints and control shapes will be automatically inferred from their position in the world.

Technical Art - III

Welcome to the third post in the series Technical Art!

We have been introduced to the concept of scripting in Maya and so far it seems very straightforward.

The thing that fascinates me most is that Maya seems to use its internal language to handle pretty much every action that the user can perform in the tool: this means that scripting has limitless potential to automate any kind of action and can manipulate the scene with a lot of freedom, as it has effectively the same scope of action that a normal user would have.

I have been experimenting with user interface creation scripts and combining those with the tasks that we have been given during the lecture, for example I expanded upon the first "cube army" script to make it configurable through a window.

I am pretty confident that I will be able to create a good user interface now that I know what kind of approach I have to use, and the documentation that Maya provides is very useful and it helped me a lot in finding the functions that I needed to achieve the result I wanted.

I will focus more on rigging in the next weeks as I want to have a more clear idea of the script I will be making for my coursework, but at the moment I still lack knowledge of some steps regarding advanced rigging tools that I think we will be covering in the next weeks, for now I will keep on practising and researching more advanced techniques, so stay tuned for more updates!

Technical Art - II

Welcome to the second post in the series Technical Art!

During the past lectures we analysed the differences between rigs for animations and visual effects and rigs for games. As expected, games have more limitations due to the performance requirements, but this also varies in different types of games: mobile games will have more restrictions than a console game; but even within the same game some characters might have more resources allocated to them which means that the artist will be able to build a more complex rig for them (to achieve a more realistic animation).

We've also been introduced to the concept of skinning which is very crucial in determining how the model should be structured in terms of topology to have a visually pleasing deformation.
Since we are required to build a rig as part of our coursework I was researching models that I could use and as I don't have very strong modelling skills I started looking into already rigged characters: this way I can just remove the rig from the model and start from scratch.

I've always been fascinated by animal characters, so I started exploring this model and its topology seems to be very nicely laid out so I will be experimenting with it in the next weeks to see what kind of rig I can build with it.

The model should be reasonably complex for a game rig, it only has 4k triangles in total, the only problem I would see is that it might require too many joints for the head to make it look expressive enough, but one could just assume that if there are no camera close ups on the creature then such detail might not be required.

I will also be exploring more the scripting side of Maya in the next weeks, so stay tuned for more updates!