January 16, 2012

This week I spent the majority of my time working on the rigs for the characters that Adam made for the 11 second club animation.  These two characters are the third and fourth unique rig that I have made in 3D.  I am a little worried about the flexibility of the rig that I have in mind because of the limitations of the types of things a joint can do in Maya.  The Flamingo only uses joints for all of its deformations. I attached a quick pic of the head rig controls, and I'm not totally wild about how it turned out.

 I had some problems when I was mirroring the skin weights, but I'm sure that has more to do with my inexperience than it does with Maya.  The Croc was my first attempt using blend shapes.  There was a moderate amount of cursing as I worked out the kinks to get the deformations linked up, but in the end I really fell in love with that work flow.  Below is an example of the smile that is a result of only using blend shapes.

Moving forward, what I learned about how to rig the character to get the types of deformations that I want is as follows.  Joints are used where there are bones in the body, and blend shapes are used for everything else.  If I want to get a crazy smile, or unique brow raise then blend shapes are a much more efficient way to accomplish that look.