Blendshapes
Well I've been reallyturning the dials in Maya lately and working nightly on the Poltergoose rig.
The last few days have seen great breakthroughs for me production-wise. I found this great Auto-rigging tool called FinalRig coded by a small company in New Zealand called Radiant Square. It's an awesome rig which let's you even have stretchy arms and legs. In fact the whole body is stretchy. I had that whole thing rigged, weighted and ready to animate in less than an hour!
Talk about awesome!
There are a few small problems however and I have yet to figure out how to fix them. for some reason the main character node, the one you use to move the entire character doesn't let you ley it. Very odd. I think I might be able to get it to work by grouping th ewhole rig but I'm not sure... I'll have to test that out.
The Blendshapes are coming along nciely although I seem to have had a few diffculties with that as well.
In Maya 7 there is a new tool which allows you essentialy exclude part s of a Blendshape which is great because let's say you decided to build a Smile Blendshape and then you wanted to be able to control each side of the mouth as well. With The Paint Weights Blendshape Tool you can paint away the influence of one side so it does not deform. then copy and and add it to the Blendshape Morphers. Pretty nifty huh? Yeah well, for for me it doesn't work.
Why? Oh hell I don't know... just 'cause'!
I'll figure it out eventually.
You can see a small tutorial of how this tool works here.
You'll need to sign up for an account but it's free and they have a lot of cool free tutorials there as well as some nifty DVDs of them too.
In other news it looks like I secured a writer for the project as well, a really good one. I won't say his name until he's cool with it but I believe he intends to come aboard and write some funny stuff for me to animate!
In the emantime I am still animating on Jay Jay the jet Plane plus doing freelnace Exposure sheets for Tutnestien so my time is limited.
I'll get there though... Stay tuned!
