Rigging, My current class

so this month I am taking Rigging. What rigging consists of is placing joints inside of a skeleton so that you can move the model around. With the picture I am showing, there is a skin layer outside of this skeleton but I have it hidden so that you can see the joints clearer. I am further along in this process so these pics aren't what you would start with but kind of in the middle before the advanced rig that i'm working on right now.


this is the skeleton just relaxed. You're most likely wondering why there are letters and arrows around the skeleton. The S stands for shoulders and it's the icon that an animator can select if he/she wishes to move the clavicle, scapula, arm bones, etc. when you click on the S, it makes all of these moveable at once. Just as the other icons which i will show in a minute to give you a better idea of how things work in rigging.

I just translated this up in the Y axis. if you notice the shoulders move along with the clavicle and scapula. The way that this works is that the rig is built up of an hierarchy chain. first the child, then the parent. so when you want something to drive something else or one to take dominance over the other, you use the hierarchy. Simple example is if you move your shoulder. If you watch it, what is moving along with it? your ulna, radius, hand, and your scapula and clavicle. so it makes sense why we would create a control that drives all of these. the shoulder bone is parented to the left clavicle IK handle. The IK is used for rotation. i'll keep it simple. (still following along?)

so what i did here is move the arrow icon. I parented the eyes to follow the icon, but however there is something else parented to the icon as well, these are called locators.


If you notice the highlighted objects, these are the locators. The eyes would be the child and the locators the parent. Hopefully that makes sense. So the locators are the child to the arrow icon, and the arrow icon the parent. That way I can either select the arrow icon and the locators will tag along due to being the child of the parent, or I can move the locators individually and the eyes will follow because they are the children to the locators....make sense? I hope so. It's really just logic if you think about it. Anatomy plays a role a little bit in helping figure out what should be the parent of what.

This is an example of what an IK does. The purple surface is where I attached the IK handle to.


As you can see it allows me to bend the arm in a certain fashion, but if you look at the V icon in the background, that is there to allow me to translate up or down in the y axis as well as constrain my elbow so my rig doesn't break....an example is that you can only twist your arm so far because it stops, adding a pole vector constraint to the arm keeps is from going crazy.

What I was thinking about doing for anyone who's interested is recording a little bit of me fiddling around with the rig so you can get the idea of what's going on. If you have read this far, please leave a comment letting me know if you would like to see a little youtube video of me moving the parts around and I will record and upload it. I'll record a 30 sec to a min clip just kind of explaining how things move around. Plus its a good refresher for me = )


that's all for now, back to studying.

Trip to Palm Beach

Yesterday I was invited by my friend to go to a drifting competition in palm beach. It was a pretty fun drive but the scenery was kind of boring. Nothing really to look at except the same countryside for 2 1/2 hrs. Once we got there it was pretty cool to see all of the different types of cars competing and they had a little section where they could practice drifting on the track. We were hoping for a little more excitement then what we got, but overall, it wasn't too bad. We ran into the owner that had sold my friend his car and since he runs most of the competition, we were able to go "backstage" (if you want to call it that, more on the other side of the fence) and take a look at some of the cars and meet the people driving them. Overall it was a good trip and I wound up driving his car for awhile back home since he was tired. If you didn't know he has a very nice car! well, as far as racing goes. We wanted to put his car into the drag competition, but decided against it because if it broke down, we have no ride home, lol. Here are some pics of the day. I will upload a video from my camera to youtube if anyone wanted to watch. I also wanted to thank lorena for the cool tripod = ) It's very useful. Before I left I came across a raccoon who was watching me, lol. He was scared so I didn't get too close but I setup my camera and got the best pic I could.



Jays Engine. His car is fast!!A racing car. Mazda Miata used for a racing school.


Here's the raccoon.

A 300zx on the practice track. If I had money, I would like to try it out. These people kill their tires since they're peeling out a lot. The whole place smelled like burned rubber! I think I still get faint smells of it!

Another racing car from the same school. I guess the school is sponsored by mazda.

Happy Valentine's Day

so happy valentine's day to everyone. especially lorena = ) I hope everyone is having a good day. I am happy today because I got a 100 on my test so i feel like things are going good in this class.

I can't remember how Valentine's day got started so I decided to look up the history of it and came across this. it's always nice to know how things got started and why we celebrate these days in our lives and history is cool (not the class though, lol).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentine%27s_Day

so anyways, no new stuff to post yet. I have maya 2008 on my mac laptop and am running bootcamp for my pc so ill try to get some screenshots taken then i can post my little duck script that I did for class.

Anyways, I want to take a moment and say thanks to the people who post comments on my blog. It really means a lot to know that people take the time to post, either just to say hi or talk about whatever. I know people are busy and have lots of things to do each day. so when they take the time to comment, I feel special, thanks!!

I hope everyone has a good day.

onto the next month!

HOORAY! I finally finished my 2 classes of mel scripting and production modeling. I have learned a great deal from both and hope that I will continue to remember everything that is taught to me. I just finished my final projects which i spent the last 3 days working 16 hrs each day to get them finished and/or working correctly! This month certainly has been an interesting one and definitely a tough one. I also am glad that it's over and i'm moving onto rigging (putting joints, bones inside of 3d models to make them move). It's the only class i'm taking this month because it's so in depth so I will have 17 lectures/labs. Normally ill have 2 classes per month 1 class is usually 10 lectures/labs, and the other class around 7-8 lectures/labs. Since I'm hoping to have a little more time this month, I decided to start working on my own individual studies to help keep me fresh and continue improving on what I want to do (which is animation). So today I was looking around for some pre-built rigs and found a couple of them that I liked so I downloaded them and posed a couple just to show you what i'll be working on.
B4 that though, let me show you one of my final projects. Since my code only works right now for the pc, i'll have to wait to show others the pictures of my duck, once i have that, then i'll post them along w/ the GUI. I do however have my head model I can show.

This is the side wireframe of me. We were required to build a bust of ourselves

this is the side view also without the wireframe so you can see the smoothness. Does it look like me?

here's the front view wireframe

here's the front view smooth. Does it still look like me? Maybe a little?

So onto the next part. Like I was saying before I'm going to keep building assets so that by the end of the year when it comes to demo reel time, I will have a whole library of animations that I had been working on and also a bunch of extra things to throw onto my demo reel. I'm excited to keep improving in animation. It certainly is a lot of fun to give a lifeless object life and character. Here are some of the rigs that I will be using for my individual studies = ) just so you know, since I was getting used to the rigs, I posed them and took a screen shot to make them more interesting.

A ball w/ legs and a tale? Is he starting the moonwalk? Eat your heart out Michael Jackson!

Since I can't touch my tongue to my big nose, I decided to have this guy do it for me = )


Scooby Scooby Doo!! I love this dog! It's going to be fun making this quadriped move. The only thing about the dog though is that its ears and face don't move = ( But at least i'll be able to make him wag and run and walk, sit, etc. And another bonus is that I don't have to feed him or clean up his poop!

Ruh Roh, he's getting ready to pounce!

I will definately post some animations of this dog once I get some fun things started with him. I'm excited to show others what I work on. I love to hear feedback and suggestions if any.

I hope that everyone's day has been good and I start my classes back up tomorrow so I hope to hear from anyone who reads this soon and look forward to posting more stuff!

KEEP MOVING FORWARD!