Kre-o Rig

Long, probably boring post on rigging! If you don't know much about rigging, it will probably not make any sense. YAY! I learned a bunch of things.

This is actually my second go at it, after re-remembering that nothing works with HumanIK if you don't have the scale set to centimeters. Most notably my skeleton likes to shrink.

I could have just built my own rig, it might have even saved me some time. But, I want to stick with  HumanIK because I feel like its going to become a staple in Maya and it really could make things a lot easier in faster in a lot of cases if it works.

I had issues with the shoulders. The Kreo toy ar,ms only lift about half way to a T-pose before the shoulders pop off which is really inconvient because:

A. HumanIK works around models in a T-pose.

B. It puts an annoying mobility issue on animating and getting humanistic poses.

After a bunch of fiddling around I found the best way was to put in 2 joints in the shoulder area and make one a clavicle like bone as far as the control rig was concerned. The "clavicle" bone is used to rotate the should like the toy would work in real life in a rigid fashion. And then the shoulder bone actually bends the shoulder piece like a flesh shoulder. It's not a perfect, but I think it works pretty well without having to mess with the HumanIK rig much.

Before I figured out the shoulder I first rigged it with a V-pose, but easily managed to switch it to a T. I grouped the joints under nulls, rotated the nulls to make the T, and then deleted the nulls. That way the joints stayed zeroed out.

The last big issue I had to tackle was rigging the face. There wasn't many face expressions they had to make, but I've never rigged textures or shaders before, and my knowledge of them isn't very advanced. I found this really great tutorial which helped a lot. I did have to get a bit more complicated because of the eyewhites and things. So I ended up using a layered shader for most of it.

 However, for some reason you cannot make a set driven key or expression for the alpha on a layer in the layered texture. I found a work around by sticking a luminance utility into the alpha input. I could then make set driven keys for the R, G, and B, of the luminance attributes that would tell the alpha what value to be. So silly.

(animation curves are set driven key connections)

Here are some examples of the faces I can make for Quick Kick with the rig I made for him. His rig has the most options in total. I only put it what I felt was the bare minimum of what I needed. If I need more I can always add it without too much trouble. Right now he has a bunch of mouth shapes, open, closed, and squinting eyes, iris movement right and left, and raised and lowered eyebrows. I also added a full or dilated one for a shocked face, but it didn't turn out as well as I'd hoped.

Oh, and I did opt for having a simple pose to pose face, instead of having in between to switch between the expressions. I think it'll look more stop motion and fit with the sparse amount of faces, and being my first time with it, simple is probably better.


IN OTHER NEWS, art sale is approaching and I need to finish illustrations! Soon. I'm thinking of editing some of my collection of horrible horrible error/bug screen caps from Maya and making prints of them. If no one buys them, I can decorate my room with failure(the good kind). Another episode of F&T is going to be out in the next week I am told. I really have to get a bunch of work done on some of those episodes left too. My origami fish project is still hanging over me, begging me to have freetime to work on it. So painfully close to having another shot done. Also I think I may currently have a fever.

Oh yah, and now that the human characters are usable, I will be modeling a and then rigging a polar bear and a wolf. I've never finished rigging(someday I will finish that deer character I made) a quadruped, so yay for learning more things.