Tech Art Homework #5

 

Basic Rigging

 

Basic Skeleton

To build a skeleton, I used the Create Joints tool in Maya and started with a root joint and then laid down a pelvis joint; three spine joints; a neck joint; a head joint; left upper arm, lower arm, hand, and fingers joints; and left thigh, calf, foot, and ball joints. Then I used the Mirror Joints operation to mirror my left arm and legs joints to get my right arm and leg joints. I made sure they were in the proper hierarchy before moving on to skinning.

Basic Skinning

To skin the joints to the meshes, I selected all the meshes in the Demon geometry group and then selected all the joints in my joint hierarchy and performed the Bind Skin operation. Maya did okay distributing skin weights to some areas of the model, but the legs needed a lot of work because there was a lot of influence on vertices from the root joint. The torso and pelvis also needed a lot of manual painting because the meshes of the upper body and pants didn't deform correctly when I rotated and moved the joints to test the skinning. Below is an image of a pose I put the model into using the joints as a test of the skinning when I finished painting skin weights for it. I put all the rotation values of all the joints back to 0 afterwards.

 

Simple FK Rig

I started the FK rigging process by creating templates for a circle control, a box control, and a box control with offset. Once I had those templates, I created a unique control the root control by box modeling a simple silhouette of a demon head and then using the EP Curve Tool to trace the shape I made. As a result, the root control for my rig is in the shape of a demon head silhouette. I also created curves from text saying "Demon" and used the MEL script "parent -r -s" to combine the Nurbs curve shapes with the demon head curve.

 

For the rest of the controls, I used my templates and modified them to fit the body better. I used my box control template to make the pelvis control. I used the circle control template to make both spine controls, both clavicle controls, and the neck control. I used my box control with offset to create all the controls on the legs and arms. To get the controls in the correct positions, I put each control in its own group and then used a parent constraint to constrain the group and the joint, deleting the constraint once I was done. Once each control was in the right position and oriented the correct way, I used a parent constraint to constrain the joint and the control so that the control would move the joint. As I did this for all the controls, I made sure to make the control groups the child of the correct previous control in the hierarchy so that the forward kinematics would work, the previous control in the hierarchy controlling the controls that come after it in the hierarchy.

Below is an image of the pose I put the model in to test the functionality of the rig.

 

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