Thursday, September 17, 2009

Finally a rig test!

Hey all...so it's been ages since I've posted anything (big surprise I know!). Anyway, I finally started a rig test with the Basic Guy that you have all been playing with (or not playing with...whatever;) ). I decided that I wanted to animate him riding a unicycle in the test....why not right? Seemed like a good way to test out his updated rig features. There's a lot of fk and ik matching/switching and... switching hands with props... and squash and stretch...etc... Also, I wanted to take a crack at rigging a cartoony unicycle as well:D

I'm also working on an updated Basic Guy that I hope to have out sometime soon (solutions to things that I found irritating when animating this clip). The rig hasn't really changed all that much, but I have written a MEL script that helps tons with selecting controls and all that. Basically, it's a GUI that when you select an object it will in turn select that rig part.

I've also written a MEL script that let's you manage your custom cameras in a single pane. So for Basic Guy, you can switch between his face rig controls and the body rig selector GUI that I mentioned previously very quickly and easily! Whew...time saver!

Oh, I think that I'm close to having the whole referenced file thing figured out too (so you can then have more than one BG in scene and have all the fk/ik matching stuff work...) I'll post another blog on that sometime soon as well.

Anyway, I'm not done with the animation here, but, I felt that it was time that I stop and post something! So, here is my still work in progress rig test with Basic Guy.

Basic Guy and Unicycle Rig Test
(quicktime movie file ~2MB)

Anyway, that's it for now. I'll try to post again soon(ish)!

Cheers and as always happy animating!