Saturday, January 25, 2014

Rigging and Topology

Hi,

Today i want to share a couple of hints for studying rigs by showing how a learned rivet technique can be applied on a simple maya example.

Basically I studied Aaron Walsman's Mouse rig at (aaronwalsman dot com).  Its an amazing and complex rig so for one training session I just wanted to focus on the riveting system he used to get the leg to stay attached to a blendshaped moving mesh.  Unlike what I expected Aaron accomplished this task using simply utility nodes.

Below I try to show how I applied the techniques I learned from his Mouse rig on a simple Maya example... 

Why does limb move with stretch of body? use of maya techniqes (vectorProduct/way of constraining a transform via a matrix type of connection… and pointOnSurfaceInfo a way of getting surface info)

Here are the images I created to try to illustrate this utility based rivet system









(Tip for studying a rig)  Ignore the entire rig and complex hierarchies.  Try to see just the joints of rig and click on a few till we see some colored channels meaning these joints are part of some kind of backend system. (Use hyper graph with frame of selection to isolate focus to one rigging system)  Use the reveal selected tool of a control then move up to a parent that has some cool stuff going on to study.

cheers,
-Nate


Inspired by Aaron Walsman (aaronwalsman dot com)
Inspired by Brad Clark's Inspired 3D Advanced Rigging and Deformation