Gilgamesh Rigging

Time to Rig Our character concept art has been finaled for a while (expect a post with pretty pictures soon). All I really need to know is where the joints and outlines are, which I can get from the concepts, so it is at least a good time to begin rigging. My last production character […]

Gilgamesh Rigging

Time to Rig
Our character concept art has been finaled for a while (expect a post with pretty pictures soon). All I really need to know is where the joints and outlines are, which I can get from the concepts, so it is at least a good time to begin rigging.
My last production character rigs have all been in Blender 2.4x, examples can be seen online in the Mancandy rig and the rigs I did for CNIPA ( Suzanne Award winning entry by Spark Digital Entertainment). These rigs are ‘old’- there’s been progress/new ideas in the world of rigging, and Blender 2.5 is designed to enable (some) of these techniques.
Research
For research I studied two great blender rigs: Sintel by Nathan Vegdahl and Blenrig by Juan Pablo Bouza. I also looked at the features of Anzovin Setup machine rig for Maya, and had a great time looking at rigging PDFs, books, and demoreels. The basics are all the same it seems, but some features I had considered ‘optional’ are now ‘required’, and I found some awesome hints for more realism/detail in rigging, such as proceduralism, skin sliding and more. As I implement some of these I’ll blog the techniques.
Jarred and I conducted some rigging and python experiments, such as Pivot Switching, space Switching, twisting Spline IK, Mouth rigging, and more. I also made the copy menu addon for Blender because copying visual transformations was a good step in automating rigs, and taught me about the various available transformation matrixes for Blender bones.
Dan Finnegan, a previous Maya user, learned enough Blender to do cloth simulation tests in controlled situations. As a result we are quite nervous about using Blender’s cloth in production! We’ll opt probably for a rigged solution, or a cloth solution that only does part of the work and requires rigging for the rest. Our cloth requirements are quite extensive based on the concept, but not as bad as some of our early clothing designs. Thanks to work done by the team at project durian, we can at least use cloth sims in linked characters.
Results

I had great help from JPBouza, who customized a Blenrig model and rig to Gilgamesh proportions from the Zepam mesh – after deliberation, I will do a from scratch rig for our main character, while borrowing some features from this rig, the most important in my opinion is the awesome mesh deformation cage he has made that gets excellent results, which he adapted to Gilga’s proportions, so I’ll probably use that with no modification. I’ve got a list of ‘must have’ features, a good idea of how the overall rig should look like, and a list of ‘nice to have’ features. Some ‘advanced’ techniques are surprisingly easy to do, while some (ahem, skin sliding) will take more work to find workable.
Requirements
We need to start animation in September, so the first thing is deadlines: we need the main body controls locked down by then. No time to wait for a final character model, so I work on a proxy I made for rigging.
A small list of needed features on the very basic proxy:

  • IK/FK Blending on the arms and legs
  • Locked Elbows for the arms
  • Locked Knees for the legs
  • Adjustable automatic shoulder rotation
  • Adjustable rotation isolation for arms in FK
  • Seamless IK/FK blending for legs and arms
  • FK control chain for Torso
  • Adjustable rotation isolation for torso controls in FK
  • IK controls for Torso
  • FK/IK switch for Torso
  • Seamless Pivot Switching for Torso
  • Toe-Midfoot-Heel Pivot for Feet
  • Neck controls that allow nice motion/deformation of Gilgamesh’s very unique neck and shoulders
  • Eye direction and tracking controls
  • Rule tagged bones for easy adjustment and robustness of the rig (with rigamarule)
  • Optional stretch for arms, legs and torso

This is not the final list, is enough to get animation started, but not finaled. More features will happen, some on the proxy, some after we get the final character model done, such as:

  • Facial animation
  • Hand and finger animation
  • Deformation tweaks
  • Bend tweaks
  • Cloth and hair
  • Procedural shakes and vibration
  • Direct knee and elbow control

Progress

We’ve got the basic FK controls for the Torso, IK and FK for the arms and legs, Auto shoulder rotation tweakable, IK FK blending working on arms and legs, seamless (no jump) blending working 90% on the arms (both ways) and working on the legs going from IK to FK. An initial control UI exists, ready for tweaks, and we have rigamarule ported to 2.5, lacking only nice UI so we can start tagging bones (Thanks Daf and Josh)

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More Snapping and Double Removal Options with Python

Yet another python add-on for today!  I hope this is one that will be useful to a great many of you, even though its pretty hard to explain how it works… bear with me as I expect it will speed up your modelling work flow. I’ve long been frustrated by the limitations of ‘Remove Doubles’ […]

More Snapping and Double Removal Options with Python

Yet another python add-on for today!  I hope this is one that will be useful to a great many of you, even though its pretty hard to explain how it works… bear with me as I expect it will speed up your modelling work flow.

I’ve long been frustrated by the limitations of ‘Remove Doubles’ in blender.  Remove doubles searches for verts which are close together (in all axes) and merges them, which is great.  However sometimes its nice to be able to constrain this action to a single (or pair of) axes.  For instance if I have a row of vertices running along the X axis and I want all of them to have the same Y and Z coordinates I could select the entire row then press “s” (to scale), “shift-x” (to constrain to Y and Z), then “0” (to snap all of them together) .  This is fine if you only have one row of vertices.  Say now that you have 100 such rows of vertices, all running roughly in the X axis direction, and you want each row to run exactly in the x-axis, so for every single one of those 100 rows you have to select each row, and press “s, shift-x, 0, enter”.  Does it get a bit boring?  Would you prefer if it was automated?

Have a look at the quick tutorial image below to see what I mean, and then if you want, download the add-on and install it.  As always let me know if you find any bugs in the comments below and I’ll try to fix them ASAP.  Happy (faster) blending!

DOWNLOAD: https://urchn.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/snap_with_axis_constraints.zip

Tutorial:

how to use the axis constrainable snap & remove doubles tools

On another note we’ve been out to the pictures a few times recently.  We saw a double feature of “I am Love” and “Winter’s Bone” on Sunday.  Personally I thought that the cinematography in Winter’s Bone was a refreshing break from the all-to-common extreme-DOF-fatigue that we got to see in the europudding (see Truffaut) of a movie that was “I am Love”, a film laced with religious salvation metaphor and comic (decency induced) visual-analogy-as-substitute-for-the-explicit.  Conversely the portrayal of value-less material items as symbolic of ‘our’ personal hollow ambitions for wealth (in the form of tacky debris spread around the dwelling; toy horses, kitsch garden ornaments displaying cherubic qualities), set against the wholesome immaterial but valuable actions of the film’s main character provided an interesting subtext for what would otherwise have been a straightforward plot.  Sadly some of our friends didn’t see it the same way and criticized the ‘off’ direction and cinematography.  One way to look at it is that they were only judging according to their own personal objective perceptions of how films ‘should’ be directed and shot, rather than to how an audience subjectively perceives a film.  Fire off in the comments; lets hear your own views!

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Across the Pond

Hello Everyone, I’m Josh, one of new crew members for tube.  I travelled over to the US from England last week, and I’m here until mid September undertaking cultural studies, and working on the models for the film.  While I attempt to mediate transatlantic differences (such as introducing the rest of the team to Branston […]

Across the Pond

Hello Everyone,

I’m Josh, one of new crew members for tube.  I travelled over to the US from England last week, and I’m here until mid September undertaking cultural studies, and working on the models for the film.  While I attempt to mediate transatlantic differences (such as introducing the rest of the team to Branston Pickle and Marmite, explaining the etymology of ‘bangers and mash’, and justifying why I need a knitted cosy for my teapot), my hosts are offering an American exchange programme complete with drive-in movies, fried dough, Independence Day Celebrations and Root Beer.  In my time away from the screen I’ve been out enjoying the fresh air, beautiful countryside and very un-British weather.  I’ve been running to and from work each day (8 ½ miles each way), and when I had a few hours to spare last weekend I biked up to the Sugarloaf Mountain.

Fresh out of finishing a long and traumatic Architecture degree at Cambridge University, I vowed never to work in the industry again.  My first task in the studio, however, was to design the station roof and columns, and to provide general advice to the rest of the team on all things architectural!  Being British, and naturally strongly resistant to change, I was slightly thrown when I realised the team was working with up to the minute svn builds of Blender.  Back home in my own work I’d been hanging on to the 2.49 vintage with its historical interface not unlike the quirky 400 year old tumbledown cottage I lived in at uni.  2.5 comes with its own breed of glossy newness, an impersonal homogeneity with other 3D apps akin to the monotony of the skyscrapers in downtown LA and a feature set which sprawls on and on like the city-edge of Phoenix, Arizona.

Bewildered at first, I was tempted away from the path of the righteous by the glowing red devil’s tail of Maya on one side and the swirling captivating vortex of 3DS on the other, but eventually I found my way through the valley of darkness.  I still miss many of the 2.49 features which haven’t yet been ported – skinning loops and multi-knife-cuts to name a few, and in my first few days I’ve spent a considerable amount of time filing bug reports, hopefully for the greater good.

There are still some very simple features I wish had been integrated into the new release.  As what Pirsig might call a ‘mechanic of the photographic mind school’, all of my previous organisation and labelling systems have been tainted with a certain amount of… dyslexic logic.  To make life easier for everyone else on the project I have to name every object, bone, group and file according to a strictly prescribed style, not least so our python automation knows what’s going on!  While I don’t mind accumulating road miles on my way to and from Amherst every day, I hate the unnecessary mouse miles blender’s UI demands.  I’ve illustrated one of the key issues (which could be solved by a simple hotkey and under-mouse-dialog) using an analogy that will be familiar even to non-blender users.

After breaking free from summers spent as a CAD-monkey in local architecture firms, I now find myself pining for the logical and consistent snapping and tracking systems I was so familiar with from hours spent in front of Rhino, Vectorworks, AutoCAD and the like.  At least the resulting ‘errors’ present in my incapable use of Blender’s snaps often results in a more derelict and aged look!  Here’s a work-in-progress snapshot of the interior of the train which I’ve been working on today, by virtually bashing it up:

That’s all for now,

Josh

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Useful Arts

At the Libre Planet conference in Boston/Cambridge earlier this year, we saw the premiere of Patent Absurdity, a great new documentary on patent issues in software. The film offers a succinct account of the risk to culture posed by Intellectual Property law’s recent metastasis. And– it has animation done in Blender by pal, Chris Webber. […]

Useful Arts

At the Libre Planet conference in Boston/Cambridge earlier this year, we saw the premiere of Patent Absurdity, a great new documentary on patent issues in software. The film offers a succinct account of the risk to culture posed by Intellectual Property law’s recent metastasis. And– it has animation done in Blender by pal, Chris Webber. You can watch it here.

Post URL by Fateh
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Copy Menu Redux

Sorry for the lack of Updates, things have been a bit hectic. Will return to Tube news soon. In the meantime, I updated the copy menu script to the Blender 2.5 Add-on system. To install, download the script, and extract it. Go to File->User Preferences->AddOns, Press Install new addon, browse to where you extractedit and […]

Copy Menu Redux

Sorry for the lack of Updates, things have been a bit hectic. Will return to Tube news soon. In the meantime, I updated the copy menu script to the Blender 2.5 Add-on system. To install, download the script, and extract it. Go to File->User Preferences->AddOns, Press Install new addon, browse to where you extractedit and select it. Then press ‘enable add-on’ next to the new ‘3D View: Copy Menu’ Add on. I’ve uploaded this to the Python contribution tracker, so it has a slim chance of being an official part of Blender.
EDIT: you can now download directly form blender-extensions SVN, and it will always be up to date
https://svn.blender.org/svnroot/bf-extensions/contrib/py/scripts/addons/space_view3d_copy_attributes.py

CTRL-C now gives you the copy active to selected menu. Don’t forget to save user preferences if you want to keep it enabled!

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