Hey everyone! There is the promised video that demonstrates the Heavy driven by LowMan rig.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Monday, May 17, 2010
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)
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.
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.
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.
Sunday, May 9, 2010
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.