Aiming Pole Vector Controls at Joints

I was adding pole vectors onto knees for a rig I'm currently animating to, and I was using aim constraints to get the curves to point towards the knees (since the knees are not pointing down any one axis).  Then I had the idea: why not leave the aim constraints on?  The pole vector curve will always point towards the joint, so no more losing similar-looking curves in a tangled mess of a bent-over-rig.

 You can also lock out the rotation, and hide them, if you choose, which will stop the animator from keying it, but not restrict the constraints from changing the values.  Perfect for this application.  It's got all of the benefits from drawing a curve between the PV to the joint, but less of the visual clutter (heck, you could even do both).

Safe from we animators, for another day.

Using a Rivet Script with Overlapping UVs

When working on my facial rig test, I ran into the problem where I had overlapping UVs, which caused issues in the script.  My solution was to move the overlapping UVs into a different UV quadrant.  Since the texture tiles at a 1:1 ratio, moving the UVs into the (-x, y) quadrant means they function the exact same, but their coordinates are different for the sake of the script.  Clever.

I used the djRivet script for Maya.

Epic Games Style Facial Rig

This was my experiments on the Epic Games style facial rig.  It essentially allows them to make one hero face, controlled with morph deformers (blendshapes), and then transfer the animation to a joint system on a series of different faces.  Joints are much cheaper to use in a game engine, and it is much easier on the animators to use a single system across all of the characters in the Gears of War game.

I edited the Nassa rig to have a mouth to test this out.  The left Nassa face is the hero using blendshapes.  The controllers drive that face, which in turn move locators parented to the verts on the face.  (I used a Maya rivet script to constrain the locators to verts.  Make sure your UV spaces are unique!)  Then those locators move the weighted joints on the character's face. The transfer wasn't exactly 1 to 1, but it was pretty close, and with more work, I'm sure it'd be closer.  With a higher-poly face, I'd need some more joints and a bit more time in weighting.  However, even these limited joints transfered to the high-poly Chip face pretty well, with minor editing on the joint weights.

(video coming soon, too)

Chip Facial Test

I recently had a project to rig up a face and animate it; the important part was making a script that did it automatically.  I just used the same head and morph deformers that I had made the previous year for the Chip model.  I had forgotten how fun animating faces was, as well as scripting.



Oh Chip, you're so racy.

Flower Story Facial Rigs

Here is a demo of the facial rigs I did for both of the Flower Story Characters, as well as a sneak peek at what we've got going on in the movie.



It was my job to finish up both of the face models, and make sure that all of the edgeflow was in the right places.  I also built the facial GUI from scratch to my own design.  All of the controls were done using (60 or more) blendshapes.  I was interested in using joints, but when I looked into it, it would have taken too much time considering where I was in the process.  Perhaps my next character will have a more joint-y face.