Friday 20 November 2015

Technical Art - VI

After lots of hours of hard work I finally managed to finish the rig! The most difficult thing I had to think about was creating two separate chains of hierarchy: one for the offset groups and control shapes and one for the actual joints; since those two are blended together as everything has to be controlled by the master controller I struggled in my first steps and managed to break the skeleton hierarchy more than once by wrongly parenting control shapes directly to joints rather than using constraint to control them.
But once I finally understood the whole concept of parenting I feel more confident in building basic human rigs and venturing forward to more complex ones.
The missing piece which I wasn't quite grasping was the concept of constraints, so I did research more tutorials and documentation about them and I found some interesting types of constraints which are not strictly related to rigging but could definitely help during animation: one of the was the normal constraint which enables the user to orient a node to the normal of a surface; this would make animating an object sliding through a curved surface quite easy, which made me realize how powerful some of these tools can be if used properly!

For reference here's a screenshot of my final rig:

Screenshot of completed level


I might still decide to add some small things along the way, for example I haven't explored set driven keys for hands but since they won't affect the skinning process I will consider adding them later on.

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