Quads, glorious quads!

Between all the editing and camera work for the short, I decided to take a break and convert the geometry of the character models from triangles to quadrangles. As you can see the models are much cleaner than the decompiled once. This conversion would also allow me to mesh smooth the models if I decide to do so later.




Also, very important information for anyone that doesn't know you can find all the rigs that Valve made in your steam folder. They are great and ready to animate the only problem is that you would need to build your own facial rig. The path where you can find them is:

...\Steam\steamapps\YOURUSERNAME\sourcesdk_content\tf\modelsrc\player\CHARACTERNAME\parts\maya

Back and Ready for Action

Hello everyone! After about 8 months of not being able to work on the short, I finally got the time and inspiration to continue. The Medic facial rig is ready for testing. I made a small video that demonstrates the features. After animating the Heavy facial rig I realized what could be improved and tried to implement it in this one. There are more joints and less unnecessary predefined mouth shapes and expression. Enjoy!

P.S. Right now I am working on the layout, so hopefully I have something to show soon.

...good idea!

This is an animation test I have been working on. There is nothing better than animation to test the rig’s stability. One thing I found out during that test is that the facial rig works much better when I use the individual controls instead of the preset mouth shapes. So I will skip that step for the Medic's facial rig. Enjoy!

Hello, Fräuleins!

Yesterday, I decided to quickly rig the Medic with the LowMan script, so I wanted to share a video of that. It was very fast again since I followed the same process as what I used for the Heavy. There were a few difficulties because the decompiled skeleton did not have forearm twists and the strange thing is that there is only one bicep twist on the right arm. I wonder why that is, but knowing Valve I am sure there is a reason.
Anyways, I added the forearm twists and constrained the existing bicep one 50-50 to the elbow and the upper arm. I had to also fix a few problems with the default skinning. The head rig for the Medic will be done later, for now I can use this for layout and story ideas.

It's been a while....

Hello to everyone reading this or accidentally visiting. I just wanted to let everyone know that I have been working on story and that is why the blog lacks posts. I am not quite sure how to approach this, because I don't really want to give away any of the story before you actually see it. I will think about what exactly to post after I finish the Medic rig. Maybe some quick sketches and fun shots in progress. For now I will just share this quick sketch of a fat scout I doodled a while ago:

It is another good day to be giant man...

Hey everyone! There is the promised video that demonstrates the Heavy driven by LowMan rig.

It is good day to be giant man...

I come back with a pretty big update today. The full body rig for the Heavy is finished. I have to thank Miguel González Viñé (lichiman.aniguild.com) for speeding up this process by creating the LowMan Rig (a while ago). This is the script I used to generate the Heavy's animation body rig. And I am about to show you how to do that. I guess this information could be used to setup any character you would like to. After following the installation guidelines that come with the LowMan rig you can try following me and I hope I am not too confusing.
We start by comparing the two skeletons. First we adjust the Heavy skeleton by the bone rotations only. We straighten the arms and legs so they look more like the LowMan pose from the Lowman.ma file that you can find here: C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\My Documents\maya\XXX\scripts\LowMan\LowMen\LowMan_1.0.ma (replace the XXX with your maya version)

After you are done matching the pose you should merge your Heavy skeleton file into the Lowman.ma and until you generate the rig you should not save the file as anything else but .ma file. You will notice we have to add an additional bone for the root since it’s missing in the Heavy hierarchy. We parent the first bone of the spine and the pelvis bone to the new root. Therefore this bone should be placed somewhere between the two. Now you have to align by bone position only, all the LowMan skeleton bones to the Heavy skeleton bones. After you have done that, parent constraint each of the Heavy skeleton bones to the Lowman skeleton bones. It’s a bit tedious, but believe me it’s worth it. (G key is your best friend here)

After the whole Heavy skeleton is constrained to the corresponding bones of the LowMan skeleton we type in the MEL script line “lowman”. This opens a window with options to scale the rig. You shouldn’t touch those settings since you already aligned the skeletons exactly to each other.

Now comes the fun part. Press the nice button “Make Setup” and your animation rig is generated and completely connected to your character with all the controls available for the LowMan rig.

From here the only thing you would have to do if you want, is to scale some of the controls since for me they are generated in a bit of a mutated way. You have to remember that the only way you should rescale those controls is in component mode, do not do it in object mode because it would affect your rig in very strange ways.

That’s all… Heavy is happy and ready to be animated. Let me know if you have any questions and soon I will upload a video to show the effectiveness of the rig.