Today i wanted to post a little about a rigging project i'm working on called Dunkster.
Basically i'm still at the deformations stage.
Some of my process is to gesture sketch a pose then try to pose it in Maya. After pose it in Maya i do a draw over telling me what area needs deformations and or improvements.
Here are some examples i made:
The shoulder area is definitely a little tricky for me. Basically i'm using 3 joints for the shoulder.
--One is used primarily to twist the upper arm, it doesnt affect much the shoulder upper arm junction. I think it will also be useful for tweaking an extreme shoulder pose in the forward back direction.
--Second joint is used primarily to rotate arm towards torso or away from torso. it is also very close in location to the upper arm. It does share influence on the shoulder area junction. I used setdriven key on translates to get the arm towards body and away from body deformation improvement.
--The Third joint is used to rotate the arm forward and backwards. When it cant rotate the arm too much more forward, i used the twist joint to tweak a little the forward motion.
There's alot i'm still working out on this project.
some topics:
--improvements to hands/fingers/eyes/eyelids
--animator controls (knee twisting, toes staying on ground)
--hip/spine control with helpful stretchiness
A small tip for the lighting. (i used a spot light to get the roundy circular shape (theres setting on shape to adjust softness of circle edge). I used a point light to help get highlights on fingers. Then i made a nurbs sphere to enclose character and a nurbs plane for the floor adjusting the sphere shader to get an improved look.
Cheers,
Nate
"Dunkster" is an original concept, character design by Nathaniel Anozie (c) Anozie 2014
