Post Eighteen

Finishing up

This is my last post, the animation is finally complete, I am really pleased with it. It has taken a considerable amount of time and effort but the end result was definately worth it, it has taken almost eleven weeks to complete; about four weeks to model everything and four weeks to bone, rig and skin the character and about two to three weeks to animate, and i have had loads of fun animating. The modelling part was probably the simplest part of the process as I new what I wanted to deliver, wish i could say the same about the bones, rig and skin, I had no clue what I was doing and had to follow some of the video tutorials here:

http://www.3dhaze.com/tutorials/char_model/index.html

This site was a really, really good resource for rigging the model and would definately recommend this resource to anyone thinking of creating bones and rigging the model properly. If I had had this information at the beginning of the course I would have probably flown through that stage, but alas I did not. I would like to have had more time to animate as I did not add the celebration section, I just had to scrap that part and make Travis do another trick instead. Anyhow here is the final animation with some funky music by the Dead Kennedys that Travis insisted on playing.

Post Seventeen

Nearing the end...

This module is closing to an end and the animation is nearing completion, I have completed fifteen seconds of animation so far and will have the completed movie in a day or two, this module has been quite fun although very time consuming, with a load of late nights and early mornings to get everything sorted. It has been very enjoyable, and most parts of the character creation process went well, I have learnt so much in a very small amount of time, although some parts like the rigging and skinning were very frustrating. The animation process was a very fun part, making my model come alive as I tried to give him a personality of his very own. I set out to have my character bail, do some tricks and celebrate, and although I am still trying to make him celebrate the other parts are more than complete, render times were very long almost an hour and a half for every three seconds, it was using mental ray and ray tracing but with only one light and it still took a long time. But for the lengthy time I am very happy with the outcome, the reflections on the floor, and the crisp look is more than I could have ever hoped for.
Here is a video showing the (almost complete) animation.

Post Sixteen

Animation so far...

Here's all the clips I have made so far sewn together:

Post Fifteen

Animation

Ok long time no post, so here goes; animating this character is getting slow, it is taking about twenty four minutes approximately for one second of animation, plus the hour or so setting the scene, I definitely underestimated the time spent on doing this part of the project. I have about five seconds worth of clips that I am happy with, there are some areas of the character that have made this task very difficult to avoid such as the weird twisting in the elbow joints that spin the whole arm when the elbow is flexed, and his sleeves that just always seem to get in the way making collision a problem too. Finally the joins where the leg meets the shorts are a big problem and always poking through; so much so I have had to render two sided to save some headaches. It could have been avoided had I known what was going to happen when his legs bended at the modelling section; I could have just made a few more lines with the connect tool and hey presto fixed. Anyhow in the rest of this post I will try to explain the basics of what I am doing, we join the animation after Travis has fallen down its now time to pick himself up and carry on skateboarding.
To start the scene I am usually carrying on from the last scene so I need to reconfigure the timeline to show this and save under a new name, it becomes easier to undo this way. Down the bottom right of the UI I click on a button that opens the time configuration panel and in there I set the start and the end time in frames for this scene it will be 150frames to 180frames.
Before we start the process of moving the character take a look in the picture above; in the bottom left window I notice Travis’ shorts are poking through the floor, fortunately the camera I am using is already set up in the top left view port, and from this position we can not see that part of the leg, but it will need fixing. Travis is already getting up; his hands are on the floor pushing his weight up and his toes are against the floor suggesting the press up position, this makes getting up simple to do. I will try to move his knees up under his chest to a squat then let him stand; as I am going to sort this animation in premier I can split this scene into several one second parts

Usually I just jump right in, click the auto key and have a play with the movement so I will make no exception. There are a few things I always check, before moving a control object I make a keyframe this at least starts the animation from that point this helps if you haven’t moved a control part in a long time. I have only twenty ‘un-do’s so be careful of what is being done. And save regularly; there’s nothing worse then something happening with out a save to restart with.

I like to work in the front or back view and one of the sides, and the perspective and have sacrificed the top view for the camera, this shows me first hand what is being seen when it is moved, I also configure the render panel from time to time to just render a frame to see it in it’s glory.
Here I have given eight frames to let Travis get his legs straight for the bend and this has sorted out the short / collision problem too. Now then next seven frames will sort out his upper body too.
Ok half way through and a quick save! both feet will fly up to his chest and his knee joints will poke through his skin…aargh! As you can see Travis has a problem bending his knees, deformities appear, and I am quite annoyed that in order for the audience to see no abnormalities I can only bend his legs part of the way.
This image shows the one second animation with Travis half way completing the squat, before the next section I always like to render my scene to see if the animation worked.
It’s looking good! But one problem I see, it is the final push upwards just a little bit fast, so rather then go back and mess up the rest of the scene I can fix this when I edit the animation, I can cut that bit and slow it down, thus saving me a lot of hassle.

The next step is to reconfigure the time configuration panel to 180frames to 210frames and save the file under its new save name. Then jump straight back in and work his movement out. I should be that far enough off the ground to pull his legs up now, and then have him land on his feet and stand up. I will try for a fluid motion but let’s see where that gets us.

First thinking about it, I will swing the camera around the character to show the side view of him jumping to squat. Maybe this will look a little better, plus it saves the knee pokey bit problem in his legs being shown to the audience.
Ok all done its only been thirty minutes or so, I have completed the scene but am unsure on the camera so I copied the camera and made a duplicate and put that front on so now I render the scene and will see which render works best.
Ok first camera straight on to character and one problem I see is my characters feet after jumping; they are too slow and they don’t jump they drag, In the second render I should have fixed this, also I have sorted out the camera bob; camera should be good now, but we still have Travis’ shorts /knees/poke through problem. Unfixable at this stage.

Here is the render: (for final movie I will use alternative camera I think)

Post Fourteen

Progress so far...

This area; the animation part is taking some time to complete, the skinning and rigging took too long to complete as I am a complete beginner in that area. I did however find some great resources through a thorough search that will be kept for future projects.

But getting back to the post at hand; I have less then three weeks left to complete the module and it has been a fabulous introduction to character animation and the results that i am getting (even though at the start) are quite brilliant to say the least, they are time consuming but very rewarding.

The plan is to have Travis Mcfee try to show off, bail; pick himself up, get up off the ground, do a walk cycle on the skateboard, then a trick or two then celebrate. It is a lot do do but I am just getting on with it, and check out these early renders! they are only a second each but they are coming out great.

Post Thirteen

Skinning

In this post I get to skin my character, The first thing to do is to delete the turbo-smooth that I have added to my character in the modifier panel, putting a skin modifier over the top would be just stupid as there would be too many vertices to weigh and modify with the envelopes, also I have animated the control objects to move the bones so they stretch and do a simple walk cycle, this helps a bit when I test the envelopes later, as I can just run the test animation and see how the envelopes affect the mesh.
So with the mesh and the bones all ready to go, I select the skin modifier from the list and then under the parameters roll-out I click the add bones option and select all the bones making sure that only bones are selected for the skin.
The next thing to do is to select a bone from the list and click the edit envelopes option, the envelopes control which part of the mesh will be affected by the selected bone, red ares mean that 100% of the area is affected and blue areas are almost no affect, orange and yellow are somewhere in between, as you can see in the next image the spine bone envelope I have selected is affecting other ares of the spine, the arms of my character and even his neck, now there are a couple of ways I can modify the envelope to affect only the spine I have selected; I could move the evvelope but this is not the way really to do this as by moving the envelope and making is smaller, I am only making other envelopes bigger, the way to do this is to weigh each vertices and select the specific bones to affect the specific vertices, it takes some time but at least it makes sure all the vertices are being affected by the correct bone.
To weigh a vertices I must scroll down under the edit envelopes option and check the vertices box, then scroll down to the wrench like icon to open up the weigh vertices box.
In this image I have selected the vertices where the arm joins the body and as you can see from the weigh vertices box it is being affected by several bones; spine3, spine4, clavicle, upper arm and head. Now we know for instance that the head bone shouldn’t even affect this vertices, so from the box we select the head bone and click on the 0, this makes the head have 0% affect on that vertices. Now for this instance I will make the spine bones have 0% influence too, this will leave just the clavicle and the upper arm to affect the vertices. I will go 50-50 and then come out of edit envelope selection and move the wrist control object around and see how this affects the join of the arm to the body, I will add the turbo-smooth modifier back to the list of modifiers but I must remember to turn it off and select the skin and the envelopes when I want to change the weight again. The turbo-smooth was added because this is what my character will look like at the final render, it all looks ok so I move on to the next vertex. It is a long process, but all I have to do is one side of the body and then replicate the amount for the other side’s vertices. It has taken some time but I have a test animation and it all looks quite good.

Just before I post the animation I would like to point out something I have noticed, there are a few anomalies where the leg tries to poke through his shorts, and after much deliberation I have put this down to bad modelling technique, if the leg inside the shorts was lined up properly with his knee instead of up over the knee I would not be getting this problem, all I can do is try to limit the bend so it does not poke through, I have tried to fix the problem but I am so far ahead of the modelling process not much can be done about this problem and when I have tried to roll back to edit the vertices, the rig fails to work, the envelopes and the vertex weight is correct as far as I can see, so this is a shame but with clever camera angles, and limiting the bends of the knees hopefully the final animation will not show this. Without further ado here is the test render:

Post Twelve

Summary

In this post I needed to do some research on the rigging process for the upper body and conducted a thorough search in Google, the most in-depth tutorials I found were four quite brilliant ones and from them I have managed to complete the rig for my character. I will list these tutorials before trying to explain what happened for the rest of the rig.

Tutorials:

http://34bit.blogspot.com/2008/01/tutorial-ik-setup.html

http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/character-animation-skeletons-and-inverse-kinematics/

http://www.3dhaze.com/tutorials/char_model/rig.html

http://www.clevislauzon.qc.ca/arts/DOCXSI50/XSIPortal/de614853.htm

And now for the rest of the rig;

I wanted to place a gyro (control object) at the wrist to rotate the hand, move the wrist and move the arm too. To start with I created an IK chain from the upper arm bone to the palm bone, and then I aligned the position of the control object with the IK chain at the wrist of my character then linked the chain to the control object. Now my arm moves by using the control object at the wrist. But to make the hand rotate with the control object I will have to link the palm bone with the control object and this will break the IK chain already made, causing the control object not to move the arm.

To sort this problem out I will use an orientation constraint this will make the palm rotation match the rotation of the control object. This is a useful alternative to linking when linking is not at all possible. I just must remember to align the orientation of the control object’s pivot point with the palm bones pivot point.

To start with I selected the upper bone and selected animation > IK solvers > HI solver to create the IK chain and renamed it, and then I aligned the position of the control object to the newly created wrist IK chain. Now I aligned the orientation of the control object’s pivot point to match the pivot point of the palm bone, and then linked the IK wrist to the Control wrist object.

I selected the palm bone and chose animation > constrain > orientation constraint then clicked on the wrist control object and tested the procedure by rotating the control object, and the hand rotated too.

For the Fingers and thumbs I had decided to create some custom attributes for each of the fingers, a flex would have a number representation of -20, 0 would be the default hand position, 100 would make the fingers pose as if it were going to grasp an object and lastly 200 would make the fingers clench in a fist. With my fingers and thumb set up this way my hand should be able to do anything a real hand would.

To start this complex process I had to change the reference coordinate system to local, as all the fingers rotated on the y axis when set to local. I selected the wrist control object and added an attribute modifier then chose animation > Parameter Editor from the list, this opens a panel where I can edit my new custom attributes that I will use to move the fingers. I have made four custom attributes one for each finger, these will be called; CurlThumbL, CurlIndexFingerL, CurlMiddleFingerL and CurlPinkyL. Each has a range of -20 to 200, and after renaming each custom attribute I clicked the add button and closed the parameter editor when I was finished. These custom attributes show up now on the modifier panel when the wrist control object is selected.
The next step was to use the Reaction manager to set up the master and slaves and create states for the rotations of the fingers, to get to the reaction manager I chose animation > Reaction Manager. In the panel I clicked on the big black plus sign to add a master then I clicked on the wrist control object and chose modify object > attribute holder > custom attributes > CurlIndexFingerL from the pop-up box. The next step was to add the slaves; I selected the two bones that make up the index finger selected the’ add selected option’ from the reaction manager, then chose from the pop-up box transform > rotation > y rotation. This would add the y rotation track for both bones as slaves and creates the initial state with default values.
Now for the fun part; I select the wrist control object and pin the stack on the modifier panel so we can see the custom attributes that have been made all the time, I set the CurlIndexFingerL custom attribute to -20 and turned the create mode on, then I rotated the base finger back 10 degrees on the y axis and then clicked the create state button on the reaction manager. This creates a state for the y rotation for that finger.
The next state will be at 100 so I change the custom attribute integer to 100, rotate the base index finger back 30 degrees and then rotate the index finger tip to 70 degrees, this makes the finger move to a grasp pose. Now I click the ‘create state’ button on the reaction manager.
The last stage is when the finger will be in a clenched fist pose, so I set the custom attribute integer to 200, and rotate the base index finger to about 90 degrees so that the tip of the index finger is touching the palm of my characters hand and create the last state, and now turn off create mode and test. Just by changing the custom attributes integers moves the fingers pose from flex to default, and then grasp to fist. When all the custom attributes have been created (masters and slaves and creating states) animating the fingers should be really easy.

There was just a slight change in the way I did the thumb curl, as my own thumb is able to rotate in all directions, when setting up the slaves for the two bones that make up the thumb I added rotations on the x,y and z axis, thus making the thumb able to move in all directions.
The last part to rig were the shoulders, knees and elbows; I had copied the wrist gyro before hand as I had wanted one for the shoulders, once properly aligned positional to the upper arm bone in the hierarchy panel I click affect pivot only and align the pivot of the left clavicle both positional and its orientation. Then turning off the ‘affect pivot only’ option I link the clavicle to the control object.
To test I simply rotate the control object to move the shoulder, with this simple process the control object is the parent of the clavicle so it may be selected easier.

The elbows and knees are added to make these parts of the rig point in any direction should any twisting of the bones occur, I need to be able to make these move independent of the rest of the body. To accomplish this a small box was created in front of the elbow/knee and was renamed an appropriate control object name, the control object knee was linked to the control object foot to keep it near the character what ever he does. I then select the IK chain at the ankle, go to the motion panel, find the Pick target button in the IK Solver Properties rollout and select the knee control. This basically causes the joint between the calf and the thigh to point at the knee control all the time. The process was then repeated for the shoulder control objects.
The last thing to do is to create a box for him to stand on and name it body control object so moving the whole rig is made easy, this is done by linking the leg, and feet control objects to the body control object then testing the object by moving it; the whole hierarchy should move too.
This concludes the rigging process, which has been in-depth to say the least now I can get on with the skinning part.