Blends Need Not Apply

I guess blogger took a dive and the original post was lost. Here it is again...

After tirelessly painting weights and managing all the driven keys, Shoeless Joe, my cartoon baseball player rig, finally has expression. He's a hybrid rig- a mixture of joint systems, deformers, and technical expressions. There's squash and stretch on the arms and torso. Boolean toggle for the mitt visibility and controls. Double hierarchy for driven/manuals keys on the facial controls. There's not a single blendshape. Not to mention a little help from a Comet Script called Pose Deformer/Pose Reader... and a beta called LipService. And it's a good beta! Lip Service is a product by Joe Alter that "is a powerful multi-resolution subdivision surface sculpting, rigging and animation system built into a Maya plugin. LipService's sculpting tools are comparable to ZBrush** and Mudbox*. Its animation tools extend this multi-resultion editing philosophy through to motion and rigging." So basically, no multiples of a hi-res mesh for blendshapes, and every pose is a golden pose- it will look good, because you can sculpt all of your corrections directly into your animation. Goodbye dozens and dozens of frickin blendshapes.

This is a lipsync rig test for Joe. Phonemes test for sentences in English. Recorded by Michael Hamm on November 3, 2003, with the aid of Mitchell Sommers in the Psychology Department at Washington University

Can a cat man a catamaran?

Merry Christmas! Mary Christmas will marry Christmas day.

Come to calm.com!

It's a long time, and I mean long.

Where's Nancy?

Who's "Nancy"??

I teach Ferdinand the calm cat to fetch cold cups of coffee. Who knows more about tasting things? He's used the book.
The rig has some more work to be done, mainly refining SDK and some other features I would like to include (hair and cloth). It's exciting for me to watch a project take on the fourth dimension. Time is the true test of integrity. More so I think with the things that we relate to as human.

Shoeless Joe

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Joe. Based on baseball legend Joe Jackson, and a drawing I did waiting for maya files to load about a year ago, I've made it into a personal project.

He's a about 9000 polygons. Thought about taking him into Mudbox, but the uniform (Maya cloth) will cover much of the work, and the anatomy in Maya alone looks fine. I'm a fan of Advanced Skeleton for quick rigging, but I created my own rig for this model. The blendshapes were awkward and didn't work well for the facial shape, especially around the mouth, so I did a little research, and decided to rig facial bones and animate the attributes as blended weights. So limited blendshapes.I used locators for the bones in the face to change the pivots of the facial bones for the driven keys, but still maintained manual control of each joint. The locators for the joints in the mouth in chin were in the middle of the head, and the cheeks and eye joints in the center of the corresponding eye. Other pivots were placed as I needed them.Double hierarchy for the locators of the facial bones for the set driven key. Driven keys first, then manual keys. Undergoing a few animation tests and I'll set the cloth up.

Driving Ms. Audi

This is my Audi sports sedan student car rig from a few years ago. This car is rigged with basic expressions, some set driven key, and standard constraints. Put it on a motion path and key frame your heart out and you can see it animates all right, but I've decided to totally strip it down to the mesh and re-rig it in Craft Director Tools. I haven't smiled continuously for this long in months. Love CDT for Maya.

Butterfly wing test - Rough

It needs some inbetweens and some tweaking, but so far, so good.

Butterfly screenshots

Posed the butterfly in some paint effects grass and branches in maya. Still trying to figure out the MEL script. Digging through the outliner, mostly, trying to make syntax jive. What a pain... may give up on it and do it the old fashioned way.

Butterfly rig

Wanted a flying animal rig and finally broke down and made myself one. Decided on a butterfly over a bird mainly because of billows in the wings and advanced rig things that I'm not prepared to try yet. Modeled a lot of the mesh myself, but got some help on the legs and body tweaks from modeler Heather Berry. The texture I threw on there just for the visual. There is nothing special about it.
The rig is a modified advanced skeleton file. I used the quadruped setup and then added the extra legs, the antennae, the wings (there are four) and joints for the proboscis. The legs are separate pieces, as are the wings. Plan to use this in an animation soon. Looking to check out a MEL script I've found for wing flutter- hope it works out.