import awesomeness as awsm

So in my last post on Houdini George had asked about whether or not I’d be getting more into Houdini. I really want to get into the rigging and skinning with it, but unless I can figure out why Houdini is constantly crashing I don’t know how effective I’m going to be. I also noticed that there are a fair bit of threads regarding Houdini crashing and I had a few folks tell me they stopped learning it because it was so crash prone (most had Mac’s as well so I’m wondering if it’s OSX specific), so I’m not the only one.

Alright. Let’s get to what this post really is about. I decided to jump on how to make a basic (and craptacular I might add) model in Houdini, layout uv’s and add a texture to it. I decided to see if a video tutorial would work and I gotta be honest, it’s a lot harder to tweak it out when your After Effects render takes 3 hours or if you screw something up or if it crashes or your kids are going to sleep, etc. I enjoyed doing it and I think it went well, but there are some addendums that need to be pointed out. Also, if you’re short on time, sorry. The video is about 45 minutes long. (The completed files can be found at the bottom.) So before you delve into it here’s what it is, isn’t and some extra notes. Continue Reading…

And while I feel like I still have some work to do on it, I think it’s a fantastic start! I think it showcases my best works thus far and it does it in a way that’s engaging. It’s only midterm as well, so I’ve got time to get the rest done still. Plus the music is awesome. I mean, who doesn’t like Trivium? Seriously? So anyhow. While I’d love to gloat, I’m still just a Rigging Padawan looking for a Jedi Master to teach me still. Continue Reading…

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.