Damn, I actualy Love my latest project.

OK, just had to post my latest update. I am extremely happy with this project so far. This is such a cool stage in graphics, you know the part where you are learning by leaps and bounds and you are actually satisfied with you work.

TurnX Work

Doing a little moddeling for the guys over at TurnX.com for a little animation. it is in it's very early stages and still has a lot of work to go, but I am happy with it so far. Created in Silo by the way. I am insterested to see if the Advanced modeling Class will be good enough to turn me away from Silo for my modeling of Characters. :)

Little Plant of Horror

My latest Finished Modeling project. Well I am not finished rigging itup but it is modeled and textured, So I am finished with it for now. Now on to another modeling project.

Adobe Illustrator images.

These come from my college days from an Illustrator class. The first was inspired by my daughter and I tried to realy get that feeling she had on a Rainy day in Florida. Next was a simple still life of a Rose, followed by a homage to Stahlberg, and inally another still life with the mesh visible to give some insight into how these images were created.

Introducing the Spine

So in scouring the net for Examples of really good rigs I finally have started finding some really good information. So today let me focus on a cool little spine setup I ran across. Actually there are several things about David Walden’s Rig that I like, but I will focus on the Spine first.

If you take a look at the image below you will see that when the lower joints, such as the lower torso, are rotated the upper joints (like the upper torso) automatically counter rotate to give a very natural feel to the rig, at least for me. Off the top of my head I would say that this is probably done with a reverse node. Lets find out.

(Only the lower joints were rotated here, the upper joints automatically counter rotate, Rig from www.davidwalden.com)


Looking into the Hypergraph and mapping one of the spine control curves we get the following.

Well there is a reverse node as well as some orient constraints. I will pull it all apart and the next update will be details of exactly how it all works.

Starting Fresh

Ok, so in looking around I see that it is time to revamp my Blog and make a few changes. Rather than start an entirely separate Blog I want to keep with my original vision of this Blog but produce a lot better material to help others out there from the pain that I have gone through and am going through to become a Digital Prostitute (Selling my talent for money for those that have asked). So I am going to finish uploading all of my work from the past as I have time, but I am going to stop bing so vague about what I am learning so that those that are really wanting to learn this stuff can follow along.

Starting with today’s update I am going to make this more of a live tutorial, or at least as much as I can. I am going to borrow from Jason Busby (www.3dbuzz.com) and try make this a learning to rig on the fly. In other words I am going to post it as I learn it, all of it. Even if it is my own brainstorming, it will go up here.

So first thing is first – Time to clean up.

Learning to be a TD.

And now the update as to what I have been doing with my weekend. besides your typical yard work, I pushed my knowledge further this weekend in learning how to rig a character. I devoted almost all of my time to the arm as I had a lot to figure out and learn. Taking what I learned from the MMTF class at 3D Buzz and stuff from the net and the Art of Rigging book I finally setteled on a system with an IK/Fk blend, stretchy Ik, and easy to access controls for everything. So let me try and breifly explain the system I used for each of these.

First the IK/FK Blend. First of all I had to learn how important having bones that are properly aligned. I had all kinds of trouble getting the arm to bend in an expected manner until I finally created a linear curve and used it to snap align the joints inbetween the wrist and shoulder (the elbow and forearm) and then the IK finally worked just like I wanted it. then it was a matter of copying the arm twice and using orient and point constraints between the IK arm and the FK arm to the arm that will be visable. This allows a simple blend between the two.

Then there was the problem of making the arm stretchy. I wanted these character to have the ability to go beyond the usual limitations of CG animation. So with the help of a couple of nulls point constrained to the shoulder joint and the IK Wrist controler, a distance between node, condition node, and a multiply divide node, I was able to setup a network that would scale the bones when the controler moved the IK Chain to its maximum and beyond.

And lastly was the most anoying of the problems I had this weekend and that was how to attach controls to control the FK arm chain but still move along with the bones. It sounded simple except for the fact of double transformations. Argh... i know its possible because the files included with the Art of Rigging were doing it, but I could not figure out how they were doing it. But after playing around with it for hours this weekend I finally figured out that if I parented the shoulder controler to a null that I then had the elbow controler parented t0, which allowed me to then orient constrain each bone to its locator and everything worked fine. So I finally ended up with a control curve parented to a null control object parented to yet another null object that o could parent constrain a upstream object. Confused??? I was! And now on to the spine and legs.

Ahhh, my Null Creations eye. I still like this one today. My first experience with Painter back in its infancy.

Now we enter my first years in college. Wow, I sure did suck a huge one back in those days (by the way, the character was drawn by a friend Kevin Mayle, everything else done by me.

And yet another crappy Genesis image. But it sure is cool to look back at all this stuff and see what I wasted my time on. :)

And another image playing around with Genesis.

More pics, then an update.

Here is an image created a while back using max and a plugin called Genesis. I wonder what ever happened to that old plugin.