In today's sessions I found it helpful to test various deformation methods on a nurbs ball. It helped to focus on the rigging and get some okay topology to work from. I imagine for shoulder, hip, and wrist area would need to combine a couple primitives together to get some testing topology for deformation.
The two topics i explored in todays two 30 minute sessions were how to remove a piece from a lattice after lattice created, and the second thing is exploring trying deform round objects via lattice rigid bind skinning.
Hope these images i made are helpful.
removing cvs/verts from lattice via paint set weights membership tool.
lattices and rigid binding to joints
Also here is a short mel script i wrote that was helpful to quickly select sets given a set is selected.
(it probably should check that selected is in fact a set and that there is at least one set selected)
string $arg[] = `ls -sl`; select -cl; for($e in $arg){ select -add -ne $e;} selectAllSetMembers outlinerPanel1;
cheers,
-Nate
Inspired by Matt Derksen's online tutorials http://accad.osu.edu/~elaine/intrACCAD/Rigging_MDerksen/
Inspired by Michael Comet (comet-cartoons dot com) orient joint tool (it was very helpful to build joint hierarchies with ok rotation axis)