Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Basic Guy 3.0.0 Released!!!!



Wow, I have finally put the final touches on Basic Guy v3.0.0 (I believe that a pig JUST flew by my window)!!! I'm not sure if you can tell, but I'm REALLY excited about it... I actually have butterflies going on in my stomach. What initially started, almost a year ago, as me simply adding a mouth to him is now a fully rigged face. I took a long time rigging and re-rigging his face (There were also a lot of model changes... which led to re-skinning the face over and over again...ugh). Unfortunately, I had a very hard time finding "free" time to really sit down and focus on him (long hours at work, playing with my son, and hanging out with my wife and friends are my excuses). Anyway, the rig is more or less based off of the ever so popular Jason Osipa style face rig. The way that I have it set up makes it pretty easy for me (or whoever) to add more controls or to refine the shapes/sliders that are already there. I really do hope that you all like the new additions. I'm even posting him before I have really animated him myself (gasp!)! I did, however, spend a lot of time pushing and pulling on him to make sure that he holds up in most situations (3d characters all have their breaking points).

I also went through and tried to clean up any bugs that people had reported. The biggest one that I have (hopefully) resolved is the fk/ik matching when he has the world node anywhere other than 0,0,0, and his scale set to anything other than 1 (Thanks for finding that and reporting it Gino!). Honestly, I am not sure how I overlooked that in the previous versions! Anyway, I apologize for any inconveniences that created.

Instead of writing a rig manual, I created a video "rig overview" if you will. It's about 25 minutes long and about 60 MB. I wouldn't call it the most exciting video that you'll ever watch (I did it early in the morning and without a lot of coffee in the veins!)...but, I hope that it covers a lot of the questions that some of you might have. Also, I apologize if the audio is low. I tried to punch it up after the fact, but I may not have punched it up enough.
Here is the link to the video (takes a little bit to load):
BasicGuy_v3_overview.mov

Anyway, I'll stop writing because I'm sure that 90%+ just want to see the next link ;):
Basic Guy v3.0.0.rar


As always, enjoy, and happy animating!
Cheers,
Tim

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

OMG, OMG, OMG!!!! I have been waiting for this for like ever!!!!!!! Thank you so much Tim you have just made my day!

Dave David said...

Hey Tim,

Congrats on completing Basic Guy and for us to enjoy, thanks!

Chris Dardis said...

Hey Tim,

Thanks so much for sharing your hard work. Hopefully you will be rewarded with some great basic guy 11second club entries!

Good stuff!

Anonymous said...

Great job! I've been a fan of your rigs for some time. Really clear and logical workflow and some awesome scripts. Can't wait to try it out.

Congratulations and keep up the good work!

Tim said...

Hey all!
lizardj: awesome! So glad I was able to "make your day"! By the way, I checked out your blog and I must say...I have much to learn about rigging! The animatable pivot thing...brilliant!

Dave: Thanks! I do you hope enjoy it!

Chris: My pleasure man. To be honest, I'm stoked to see just about any animations done with my characters... I'll be sure to keep my eyes open for the 11 second clubbers though (one of my coworkers wants to use him there as well...)

ydiaz: Thanks! One of my biggest goals was to provide you all with a rig that is straight forward and stable (please dear God, let it be stable!!!). At this point I'm very happy with the main rig and everything "new" from here on out will more than likely be more bells and whistles. "Awesome scripts"...hahahahahaha....thanks;) But, the script that I wrote for Basic Guy (the GUI) is more or less my first "real" script. I'm sure that anybody that writes mel fluently could look at it and burst a lung laughing so hard.

Thank you all again for leaving me awesomely nice comments! It makes all the hard work worth it!

Cheers,
Tim

Jason Barnes said...

awesome, so awesome...

Anonymous said...

Hi Tim.. Basic Guy is awesome.. i usually practiced my animation with that rig..
thanks a lot Tim

Anonymous said...

I like Basic Guy very much. I am really enjoying. Thank you for making a great work like this. Since I am a Japanese please put a thumbtack on the world map in your website. thanks again.