import awesomeness as awsm

So I haven’t gotten around to getting 2.9 of quick playblast done, nor another qt tutorial. But what I have been doing is creating some really awesome rigs. I’ve been working on a quadruped rig for about 4 weeks now and ended up scrapping the entire thing because: a) it didn’t work the way I wanted it to; and b) it can always be better. Nothing’s ever perfect, but I strive for it anyways. And while the new rig isn’t perfect either, it’s got some really awesome features on it, that I’m really excited about. I’ve also never rigged anything but bipeds before, so this threw an entirely new challenge at me from both a rigging standpoint and a thinking standpoint. In the end, I think the first rig taught me a lot, but the second rig was definitely the fruits of my labor. I started on the new rig on Friday and all I have left to do is the tail (which I just made an awesome solution for as well).

Which is a great way to tie in what I’ve been working on for the past few hours. I’ve been attempting to make an art directable tentacle rig, with some dynamic waving… but without using dynamics. I could have setup a hair simulation down a joint chain, but where’s the fun in that? (Actually that would be really fun, so I may still do that since I got to do it the way I wanted to now.) So after much trial and error I actually made an ik/fk tentacle with dynamic waving. And all I had to do was go back to basic rigging techniques to finally figure out where my issue was. Sometimes we make this too complicated on ourselves and this was one of those times. So without further ado, here’s a short video of my tentacle rig (excuse the animation, I just did it for testing and showing it off) :).

After I get the tail done and get the quadruped skinned I’ll be asking the models author if I can make it available for download. Until then…

*update* The model had some really bad geometry in spots that made weight painting undoable. Not so much undoable, as that it wasn’t deforming the way that it needed to due to flipped normals and the such – none of which were able to be fixed by anyone I gave it to. So I’ll be either creating a new model for this rig myself or possibly finding a really good modeler – I’m looking at you Aron Caldwell – who’ll do it for me.

Here is my animatic for my demo reel. I’ll (obviously) be putting in the actual animations and showing off the scripts and the rigs in it, but for now it’s just stills.

I’ll also be taking out the “Doodles” pages and adding in some of my other scripts, such as my user preferences loader (which allows you to carry your preferences on a flash or hard drive and by running the script it loads them onto any computer – in use by a few hundred students at AI – Chicago) and my maya crash helper (moves the file that maya tries to save when it crashes to the desktop, because it’s a pain remembering where it saves the crashes – and on OSX and Linux it’s next to impossible to remember because it always changes). I’ll also throw in my auto-rigging script which I’m working on right now. It’ll probably have a similar functionality as Jason Baskins (rig-O-matic) because I like the way his whole thing flows (and I’ve helped him debug it over the past few months as well). ABAutoRig is also really nice, but making a “dummy rig” seems counter productive to me. If you’re doing that, why not setup half of the real rig and use rig-O-matic? (I’m not knocking the rig or the work, because the rig that it gives you is VERY powerful and REALLY well done.)

I’ll also be including all 3 rigs I did in my Senior 1 class. The Troll Rig Demo that I have up here currently is actually REALLY old at this point. Since then I’ve gone through another 50 iterations to tweak it to the max so it’s much better now and fixes most (if not all) of the problems the old one had (such as the feet not staying in place {noob mistake} and some other stuff as well).  Enjoi!

Doing a rig for our Senior 1 class. This is the unfinished version with a stretchy back. Since then I’ve removed the stretchy back and simplified it a bit. I’m going to implement the stretchy into all the limbs at some point, but here’s a quick demo of the old rig.