Falott

Ive just downloaded your image to tinker with, Im off for the evening now as Im just real tired, will post a 'review' with my 'infamous' red pen tomorrow at some point.

Later

_J

well, to me your pen is famous but don´t waste to much time on me! anyhow, can´t wait what your coming up with. in the meantime if you don´t mind I´ll study your mesh from the alien guy.

the picture below shows my big problem which I´m allways bouncing back to. In reality the head - from the meshpoint seen - is a cube and talks me into believing he is a sphere. what ever I try with it the very basic nature of the head is a cubeshape. e.g the alien guy´s nature is a sphere or some kind of shape in between I wasn´t able to undertand until now. so if you don´t mind I will stick to the alien guy and try to understand what the meaning of this strange mesh people call edgloop/or head is.

cause I´ve to work the next 11 hourz I´ll post tomorrow what I have come up with. and thx again for donating your time!


PS: this is the former head I was working on.

long time no progress here. worked on the challenge, but had to put it down cause I have lots of work to do. I quit my old job and try to get into one education center for maya. therefore it´s good to have a walkcycle to show.

I built this skeleton. my first asking is about the local rotation axis of a joint. after arranging all of them I did this:

orient joint
created IK handles - 1 for each legs


inside maya 5 tells to ->

"Activate the local rotation axis and modify all of them so that the rotation axes are perfect."

what is a perfect rotation axis?

if I do so with the local rotation axes tool it happens that the whole foot rotates with the LRA but the "original xyz-axes" which can be moved with the rotate tool stay the same. This makes no sense!

maya docs say ->

"rotate axis offsets the orientation of the object relative to the orientation of the object's local rotation axis."

well, that's fine for me! but why is the geometry rotating whilst manipulating the LRA??

I wonder if someone could paint a picture for me. So I might be able to understand. don´t take it literal! I´ll once again RTFM.

added a pic - hope it is not too chaotic

and one to have a little overview

nice so far.
but the mesh of the head looks a bit odd.
try to set the loops this way:

thx for the edgeloop pic - it´s most informativ!

Falott

Your Local axis on the legs could have been created perfectly when you drew them. Just by putting the axis orientation to 'none' in the settings. This particular setting is used mainly Ive found with an RP IK solver.

bear in mind the axis will always follow the direction you draw (this may sound obvious)

As for the rest of the joints on the body and arms I usually do the joint with Z up the bone. Sorry I cant be a little more helpful right now as Ive not rigged for a bit so Im a little rusty, but a few weeks and I'll be back on it.

http://img169.echo.cx/img169/6805/orientation3ul.jpg

_J

it´s salving to know having someone like you in the back watching. no prob, your pic helped me cause of its easyness! as one can see my former attemps were quite confusing. I'm going to do simple testing now.

Hey Falott

No probs, rigging is not easy, I wish I could do it without the manual. I think after rigging the next 6 characters Ive done or so things should be a little bit better.

Im glad the image was simple for you to follow. Theres just not enough stuff explained in a simple way for rigging.

Ive only rigged 2 production characters in the last year and they work really cool as they have blend shape corrections on so the future looks promising on that side of things too.

Later

_J

well well, I think about rebuilding the whole mesh. and there is something else. does anyone know a kind of splitting edge loop tool for maya? cause it´s a real pain in the ass when geometry gets dense to split every loop by hand with the split polygon tool. I think there must be a lot of scripts providing some sort of solution for this problem which I bet almost everyone who's modeling organic geometry ist confronted with sooner or later.

Try MJPolytools

thx - I´ll checkt that out!

wheeee! the poly tool is amazing. another MEL Script I found is the SpinfacesTool created by Giuseppe Improta. it´s very handy for organic modeling! it can be found on this site -> http://www.knower.it/

thx again for the tip caligraphics!

Hi there Fallott,
I thought I take a break and start looking at some other peoples work, and so far I must have to say that is the best looking girl I ever seen. In addition, unless I am miss understanding you, I don't think you need to rebuild everything. In my opinion, I think that even though the loops of the face could be built better, the rest of the body looks great. As for the face don't discurage, I haven't been able to get it right either. Also to help you out, I found a book that seemed interesting on modeling a human. It is called Maya 5 Fundementals which also includes video tuts that follow with the book. Though I haven't finished watching the video with head modeling, but from what I have watched so far the tutorial shows some tricks on using the create polygon tool and then extruding the edges. Considering that my last program I had delt with spline patch modeling, the create polygon tool works sort of in the same manner which I think makes things easier for me than tring to shape out a face from a cube. I am really looking forward on finishing the video after I finish my cartoon dog.

hi junkyBob and thx for the flowers!


exactly this way of modeling I first thought to be great and easy modeling caused me major problems. It´s cool in the beginning to block out the main part of - in my case - the head. but I had a serious problem to get the mesh into a usuable edgeLoop later on. when painting the silhouette with the createPolygonTool and extruding it - the headShape is cubic and edges are allocated in a cubic grid style. I hope you understand my goddamn english.. I simply failed on rebuilding the cubic into loopy mesh.

But! I found such a Terminator-DVD for organic modeling and bought it today - can´t wait the delivery of it! I found it on

http://www.freedom-of-teach.com/main...oads&pid=index

watch the short videos man! this guy has an awesome style of modeling - and he is damn fast!! additionally his way of tweaking the geometry looks so relaxed!