It's been a while since I last posted up any of Hemmy's progress due to some rigging and skinning issues with the Pose Deformer plug-in issues I kept coming across. I must have rigged and skinned him about 5 times so far but all the trouble was worth it when I finally saw him moving. I attempted a very rough walk cycle today and I can already see what it is that I have to change on him. I know it's probably very bad but it's my first quadruped animation. I can't wait to look into different animation methods to see what fits best our animated short. So this is what I need to consider after this first test:
-Fix some skinning issues that appear during the walk
- Limit the translates of the leg controls to avoid any weird rotations in the joints
- Replace the basic blendshapes with separate controls for the facial rig.
-Consider any squash and stretch to the face and spine for some comedy.

I spent a bit of time analysing what could work best for Hemmy's expressions when it comes to facial rigging.  For this I drew a few extreme expressions using squash and stretch. It turned out that the best feature for his expression will most likely be his big eyebrows and his ears. It's best to keep his snout/beak more solid with a possible slight, tilt in case his face deforms completely and turns into a completely different character. 

I looked into facial muscles around the eye and forehead: the obicularis oculi (muscle around the eye), the corrugator (eyebrow muscle), the frontalis (the forehead muscle) and the procerus (muscle inbetween the eyes, just above the nose). Each of the muscles will most likely have separate controls or blendshapes. 

Over the past week I have explored further technical terrain in Maya. Having experimented with the skinning pose deformers/ reader plug-in and Maya muscle system (techniques in Maya can get quite discursive) I decided to go ahead with pose deformers. It is a time efficient way to go about this particular pipeline and can create similar results to Maya muscle, especially as this project has a limited time schedule. The Maya muscle system is really fantastic and has many advantages over posing and sculpting dirtily with this third party plug-in. 

I have also started looking at Maya nDynamics, using multiple nuclei and Ncloth settings. Ncloth is packed with a myriad of presets. In this case I simply applied a silk preset to the chest geometry and applied point constraints to bind it into a position (check out Digital Tutors). These type of animated enhancements are desirable for the final render.

A few stills of Kinnaree's rigging process:

One of Alan's suggestions on our last tutorial, was to get to know our characters more before jumping into complicated rigging. As an exercise he advised to look through our animatic and roughly work out with quick sketching what sort of poses are needed for the animation.

For a start, Hemmy will have to be able to run which his back legs and skinning are restricting him from doing so, at the moment. Also, he can't sit down due to some skinning issues and his tarsle joint not being able to be placed flat down. 

The whole of next week will be getting deep into Skin Deformers in Maya to solve these issues.

An exercise that all professional animators (Disney, Pixar) do and help get to the head of a character is working on a pose and an expression a day. That exercise will help with getting used to posing the character by starting with quick thumbnail drawings. 

For the expressions, a good start for Hemmy will be to look into human faces and gradually move to animal ones. The drawings will help to get a good idea of squash and stretch on the characters’ faces and what sort of controls will have to be added in order for the drawings to correspond to the digital version.

For the body, it’s important to get good arcs (spine curvatures), especially for the dance sequence. That will build a good foundation artistically for the animation period. 

Examples of expression sheets and poses

We shouldn't take the muscle system too far but stick to more simple pose deformers to switch our concentration to animating . People will forgive a bit folding on the geometry but will not forgive poor animation. LOOK AT THE OVERALL PICTURE; DON’T WASTE TIME ON UNNECESSARY TWEAKING. 

Two computers in the red room will have the Pose Deformer plug-in installed for us to use it for any skinning issues with the body and enable better squash and stretch on the face and body. Squash and stretch will be more necessary for Hemmy as a sidekick, more humorous character as opposed to Kinnaree who is a more human, elegant creature. 

The facial animation will work with sculpted blendshapes but also clusters on the top for more control of the facial features and expressions. It’s best to have the head separate from the rest of the mesh for easier blendshape control. 

Grab some generic characters to start practising animation. Or even work on just curves and arcs which is central to the character and work our way outwards by moving to the body and then the limbs and the face. Once we get the root animation right then it will be easier to work with the rest of the body. Practice posing will help in what pose we want to get into and make animation more understandable to us. Work with layers when using root animation and use low-res geometry to make life easier. 

Even to work on our Pre-Viz, we will have to practice our posing from this very early stage of refining the characters. Put together reference sheets for emotions, not just the generic sad and happiness but also the in-between, less obvious emotions. That communication level is vital for an animator but also for an actor. World known actors think how to make things via their character but they still have to communicate and find a way to do it in a reduced manner. When thinking of Kinnaree her emotions will be a combined graceful-happy, graceful-sad. With Hemmy it’s playful-happy, playfull-sad. These emotions will take time to depict. 

While refining the characters for animation we might find that we’ll have to work with limitations as the characters might not be able to do any extreme posing. Sometimes restriction is good; it makes you figure it out. 

Look up the Book : Dynamic Drawing. 

Include strands to our week to week schedule to merge the animation practice process with the character refinements of the first two weeks. This will run through the whole projects. 

Side schedule strands for the next two weeks: Set up, Posing and expression practice 

Look into the shaders to work out the complexity and reduce rendering time. 

Use Alan’s tutorial to reduce the size of the maps -> less rendering time 

Use material x for mental ray. 

Mipmap tends to work better.

Major Project Proposal by andriana_laskari

Minor Project submission, includes:

Art of

Supporting concepts

Two complete character turnarounds

Hemmy's skinning was a long process which consisted of binding and rebinding the skin to try out different binding methods. At the moment he can only be posed simply because extreme poses like sitting down cause deformation of the geometry. Next step will be to tweak any stretching the joint values have caused to the texturing. 

Happy New Year, everyone. Some more progress..., mainly texture overhauling. I'm using traditional Lai Thai symbols and shapes to develop different elements. The images below have been arranged chronologically over the past two weeks.