A note on Object Spaces

Our animators have really struggled to animate our character holding each other and props. A few things could have been done to make their lives a lot easier. 

First off, make all of your important IK's able to follow the object space of most of your other controls. Its pretty easy to set up, just take a few condition nodes, a few locators, and a parent constraint. Having a drop down menu of object spaces that they can follow will make their lives a lot easier. Oh, you want the hands to be clasped together? Put it in the hand space. Same with any props in the scene. Purses, bags, etc. If they are part of the character rig you can give them a list of spaces to follow as well. 

Following other characters is a little more tricky. I haven't implemented this yet, but if each of your controls has an extra group above them, that is completely clean, doesnt do anything, then you should be able to parent that group to whatever control you need it to follow. Should work decently. You could also make an object in each characters rig that can follow any object in the scene to make it even more clean. Need mindys hand to stay on Steves shoulder? Just take Steves "follow object", have it follow his shoulder. Then parent constrain the clean group above mindy's hand to his follow object. You can now move steves shoulder, it will move the follow object, which will move the group above her hand, which will move her hand, but you can still move mindy's hand independently.

I have spent as much time helping the animators set up constraints and locators, fix things they have broken, etc as it would have taken to just set everything up to begin with. Make your animators lives easier. 

Python Scripted GUI's

So, I spent a few days figuring out how to get maya windows and panels and layouts and buttons to actually do what I wanted. It was a battle, but in the end they are simpler than I thought. When you are building a window, you are parenting objects inside of it and inside of each other. Once that clicked I was able to set up a hierarchy that worked.


Note about GUI's. Some animators like them, some don't. The Cenk Rig gui is so attractive and nice looking I decided to make GUI's for our characters, and was surprised to find that one of our animators wasn't happy about it (which was unfortunate, cuz I had already spent 3 days making them). So, pro's and con's of GUI's.

Pros:
GUI's are pretty straightforward to use and very organized. Its hard to lose a control, and they are out of the way.
The Rigger is in complete control of everything that is happening in the GUI. It is super easy to lock things down and make sure every control is making beautiful shapes.
Cons:
The animator is not in complete control of everything. :) A GUI can put limits on the rig that the animator fights against.
Harder to make one control do lots of things, might lead to more controls if you aren't careful.

There are definitely more, but thats all I got for now. In a perfect world, an animator would be given a rig that is unlimited, looks beautiful in all poses, and is super easy to control. On this film, we decided to go with GUI's cuz they look cool mainly :D Would I do them again? Probably, but simpler. I tried to take every possible micro control and hook it up in the GUI, and I don't think our animators are ever going to use em. Possibly have both? Meh. Take a poll, see what your animators like.

More Facial Firing Order

K, once you have all of your micro's and macros hooked up, whats next? Hooking up all of your squashes, sticky lips, and secondary controls. This can get pretty complicated, what with trying to keep the teeth and eyes in the face, avoiding double transforms, etc. Here are my thoughts.

Clusters probably fire first. If you try and do a eye squash lattice before your eyelid has moved you are gonna get some funky stuff.

Secondarys come second. They are basically a small rig that, serving a similar purpose to your main facial rig. You want it firing before all of your crazy squashes as well. Probably.

Sticky lips come next.

Eyesquashes come next. These guys are interesting. I used a lattice for them, but that means you have to blendshape them out, cuz you cant paint lattice weights (thanks maya). Now, your eye squash lattice has to have eyelid movement coming into it or it will break, but you dont want double transformations. So, blendshape only your eyelid movements into your eyesquash. And blendshape only everything else into your final squash. When your eyesquash comes into the final they will add together to make 1.

Or as I just discovered, you can just make a cluster for your eyescales. Doh.

In theory. Like everything else I have said on this blog, this may or may not work. :)

Topology tips

These are some things we learned through experience.

Make sure you have enough edge loops on the underside of the arm.

Make sure you have enough edgeloops at the elbows, knees, and fingers.

Make sure that your edgeloops follow the nasolabial fold down to just outside the corner of the mouth.

Your life will be much better if you keep these things in mind! :)

Vertex Order

K, so your vertex order is extremely important when it comes to blendshapes(and a lot of other things, but blendshapes are probably what we are gonna use the most.)

There are lots of things that will change your vertex order. Seperating your mesh, deleting faces, adding edgeloops, etc. If you do any of those things your blendshapes wont work. Which can cause problems.

For example. I needed to add edgeloops to the fingers, there weren't enough to keep the volume in the knuckles. Unfortunately, my facial rigs mesh includes the entire upper body. How can I add those edgeloops while still keeping a clean mesh?

First, I corrected my mistake from earlier and copied all of my facial rig clusters over to a new mesh that was only the face and neck. This new face mesh had a different vertex order though, so I cant just create a blendshape from that to my new face and body mesh. So, I make a duplicate of my new face mesh. This duplicate will accept blendshapes from the old mesh, but it doesn't have a body attached to it. Not very useful.

So I duplicate my old face with body, and chop off the head. Then I add all of the edgeloops I want to the fingers. Then I do something very sneaky.

I combine the two pieces of geometry. Select the face first, then the body, and combine. Maya will keep the vertex order of the first piece you selected, in this case the face. So now my face has a body, but still has the same vertex order as the new face mesh. Blendshapes will work.

All that is left to do is delete the history on the new mesh, create the blendshape, and viola.

A bunch of things we learned this time around

First off, be very careful about where u put your nasolabial fold topology. It should go from the ala of the nose to very near the corner of the mouth. Super important, you wont be able to get a good mouth corner movement.

If you want to make accurate multi piece eyes, make sure that your eyelid thickness touches the surface of the outer eye but doesnt go in. Use a rotation deformer if you can.

Micro Sculpts First

After some thinking, I think we should only do one off sculpts for the micro rig. No combo sculpts or macro sculpts until we start building the macro rig. We dont have the time to make mistakes with the sculpts and redo them. Once the macro rig is done we can see exactly which macro sculpts we need to build.

Firing Order

Firing Order is important enough to get its own post.


If you fire something first, it will move in relation to the things that come after. So if you fire your lip FB first, then rotate your jaaw they will not move forward, but will move at a diagonal along the rotation of the jaw.

Basically if you fire something second then it will move just as u expect it. If u tell it forward, it will go forward. Around a curve, it will go around a curve.

I need to do a lot of testing before I figure out the best firing order for Mindy. There are a lot of clusters. :)

If something looks funky with your weights but you think they should be right, check your firing order.

Notes On A-Pose

K, looking back, A-pose probably wasn't worth it for this project. But, it was a great learning experience.

After talking with Dallin about the IK wrist controls orientations, I think we built the IK arm's incorrectly. We built the IK's at an angle, but I think we should have built the IK in t-pose, and used the control to move the bones into position on the character.

Well, live and learn.

Notes on building the Three Curve Principle inside of Maya

Hope this is a useful reference for you guys. These are tips and tricks and problems that you will run into as you are building your facial rig using the three curve principle. They are in no particular order, I'm just typing em as my brain thinks of em.


- Rotation Orders. Are super important. If your cluster is flipping, change the rotation orders until you get one that doesn't flip. I can't believe we never figured this out on ram's horn. Lol, we were super lucky that most of our clusters worked on our curves.
- Nurbs Surfaces K, if u are using the pointOnCurveInfo node and an aim node to attach your loc to the curve, know that nurbs curves flip if they are in an s. That is just the way they are. They interpolate their normals based on where the control verts are (in my limited understanding), and so they will flip the normals if the curve snakes. This is a problem cause we use the normals and the tangents to get our locs rotations. So, to fix, if u need an s curve use a Nurbs surface and a pointonsurfaceinfo node. Their normals are adjustable and predictable.
- Firing Orders This is super important. SUPER important. Not only is it necessary to have the FB firing before the LR, mouthcorner LR, etc, so that your forward back will stay perpendicular to the face, but it is important to have all of your mids firing before your inns, and outs. If your left fires, then your mid, then your out, all of your clusters will be biased toward the left side. (Note, this is mostly only important on clusters that are rotated. If they are all oriented exactly the same, I dont think it makes a difference.)
- Quick Sets Super useful for quickly hiding everything but your one to one zones.
- Component Editor This guy is the only way u can make this method work inside of maya. Painting cluster weights crashes my scene every time, and you get more precise values with the component editor anyways. Go to the weighted deformer tab, shift or control select the verts u wanna move, and then use the scroll bar at the bottom of the window to adjust them. Super nice. Combo that with the lasso tool and an intuos, and u can go pretty fast.
- Left, Right, Mid When setting up your weights, do the left side one to one, then mirror that to the right side one to one. Put both those to a value of one, and now you can make your mid. Once the mid is there, mung all your controls and test them. They will be off. That is when you iterate. Left, right, mid, check everything, left, right, mid. Do that for the one to one, and then once that is perfect use the same method for your falloffs.
-Draw on the screen Brian Tindall recommends this, and it really does help. Use a dry erase marker, it comes off. This allows you to really quickly hit your curves.
-Cluster Handles matter not at all It is only their pivot point that matters. Put the handle wherever it is easy to select, but makes SURE that your pivots are in the right spots.

Anyways, good luck

PoseDeformer

In my quest to preserve volume in the wrist and fingers I stumbled upon Michael Comet's PoseDeformer. This is a wonderful tool. It makes use of cone readers or pose readers (that you can learn to make here) and a custom poseDeformer node to blend between poses and add or subtract volume. Epic!

It took me a while, but I was able to find a version of it that works on linux Maya 2014. Thanks to David from DJX blog for all of his work keeping scripts up to date and Erik Johansson-Evegård for the linux version.

In only thirty minutes I was able to improve the volume preservation. We will definitely be using this plug-in on the film, and I already talked to Chris to get it in the pipeline.

Before

Here's a tutorial on how to use it.

I am testing all this on the Kayla rig by Josh Sobel.

Things to teach:

Basic Troubleshooting

Pole Vectors

Constraints

Set Driven Keys

Reference Rig

BodyMech Rigs 1.1 Update! from joe daniels on Vimeo.

https://gumroad.com/l/xhRK/

Here is another good reference rig

Twist and Shout... in frustration.

This is Tyler Dotson. I'm having some trouble with the twist systems on my rig. After saving I came back to the file and found the rig like this. After moving it around a little bit the joints all go back to where they belong, but the bind pose is stuck deformed like this. Is this going to be a problem/is there a good fix for this?

Joint Orients : The Hand

K Tyler, this is for you! 

According to my basic knowledge of rigging, joint orientations on the hand all depend on the direction the digit will be rotating. Fingers are most often rotating "up" or "down". The thumb is a lot more interesting orientation wise, because it will be rotating "in" and "out", and most likely on a slight angle. 

This example is the joint orientation of the bind chain in the free Zombie Rig from Sony. They have the -Y pointing down the chain, as opposed to our +X.

Hope that clears things up.

Joint Orients

Hey Guys! Joint Orientation can make or break a rig. This article at Rigging Dojo explains in detail the ins and outs of setting your bones up correctly. Check it out!

Welcome to a new year of Rigging

Hey guys! With Papa we have an awesome opportunity to create some beautiful characters. The character designs are going to be amazing and we have extremely talented modellers. It is going to be up to us to make sure they live and breathe, and look gorgeous while doing it. This blog is a resource for us to post any tips, tricks, breakthroughs, or successes that we have. I am stoked to be working with yall. This year is going to be epic! Stephen