...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.

The Face Rig (Part 05)

Wohoo... it's been a while since I posted anything. I have this video since a while ago but finally decided to share it with you. It's just a brief demo of the Heavy's facial rig. I hope u enjoy it.

The Face Rig (Part 04)

I don't blame the Heavy making a face like that... it's been long time since I posted anything. Work has been a bit crazy, but at least I managed to do some things on the side as well. The facial skinning of the weights is completed except some tweaks, of course, that will come up while setting up the shapes and controls. Here is a very small sample of the progress, but soon I will have an animation test for you as well.

In addition to that, I realized too late that I haven't created better geometry for the eyelids so I had to add them later. That is why they are separate geometry.

The Face Rig (Part 03)

This next part is about the controls I would like to use for the facial rig of the Heavy. As you can see in the picture I have placed small circles on top of the joints. Each of these controls consists of three layers (starting from the top of the hierarchy to the bottom):

1. Constraint Node - invisible and is used to blend the position and rotation between the upper and the lower jaw parts using parent constraints
2. SDK Node - invisible and is used for creating mouth or facial shapes with the help of the Set Driven Key tools in Maya
3. Animation Control - visible and is used for animating manually offsets from the pre-made SDK mouth shapes
   

This facial set up is inspired from the tutorial that I found a while ago created by Canadian 3D Animator Chris Fram. Unfortunately his site www.dirtyoldtoon.com does not exist anymore, where I actually found the tutorial, but check out his blog. I hope later I have time to show you how I made this simplified version of the rig (with video and more details).

The Face Rig (Part 02)

This weekend I was doing some work on the Heavy facial rig again. After some thinking I decided to separate the head from the body. I also deleted the faces that represented eyeballs on the decompiled model and replaced them with real spheres. All that made me realize that to make my work easier for later I needed to separate the inside parts of the mouth as objects of their own.

I allowed myself to make small adjustments to the tongue geometry and the inside of the mouth, just because i needed the model to work well with joint driven facial rig.

For the actual tongue movement I have decided to use a few blend shapes, but for now I am not sure what the result will be... I promise to share it with you even if it's unsuccessful :)

The Face Rig (Part 01)

The progress up to now with the Heavy. I have decided to make a new facial rig not made of Blend Shapes (Morph Targets) but instead using bones. By using a helpful small tool called VTAapply (you can find a bit more about it here) I manged to import the Heavy in-game blend shapes into Maya. This way I can use them for reference on where to place the facial bones. You can see on the video that the targets have different vertex numbers and that is why it's making distortion once blended. By doing my own facial rig I will have much more freedom during the animation of the characters... and I sure like freedom.

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The Beginning

Sooo ... welcome to my first blog. I have decided to share with you the process of making a short film, starring a couple of characters from the game Team Fortress 2. The blog (hopefully) will include everything from the decompiled, imported assets in Maya to the completed product. I hope you find the info here interesting and maybe even useful. Since we all love pictures i will include a snapshot of the Heavy model in the Maya viewport. All the models that you see on this blog are property and created by the very talented people at ValveSoftware (www.valvesoftware.com). I don't take credit for any of them unless stated so.