Nobby comes to life!
 

Ha couldn't resist it... I haven't finished this character fully just wanted to test out my new animation controls... Still gotta get my mind around Character Sets and the Trax Editor. I dare say it won't be too long.

It's great to start doing some animation again, even if it is silly - most important I did it in Maya!

BTW I've decided to call this creature 'Nobby', in case ya didn't guess.

Looks like fun! Would you mind describing your rigging setup? I'm curious to know how you've setup your animation controls.

Dannygan

First off I have just been banned from the Animation:Master Mailing List for being honest... bit annoyed about that - looks like I am here to stay at Simply Maya.

Anyway it was fun, and it was a little easier than I thought. I have been studying the 'Learning Maya: Character Rigging & Animation' book. That's where all the controls and riggng have come from. I have been doing this to compare A:M with Maya, A:M has some cool tools but it has been a buggy bastard, whereas Maya hasn't crashed on me yet.

I am about to embark on learning Blends Shape to do some facial animation then I will produce a little movie to show you all!

Like you site m8 lots of resources!

hey that looks great gazz!!! so you have been banned from the Animation:Master Mailing List ??

what the hell for? for saying you done it with maya?

any ways mate! pm comming your way in about 5 mins... I alike dan am interested in the controls on this

i just like it :D looks great

O.K. I am trying to make this sucker blink but his eyelids don't seem to wanna work! Look at the pic attached. I have created a locator above his head (not parented) which has SKD attributes on it to make the eyelid clusters open and close - it works fine.

Now when I rotate the head the clusters distort as shown in the pic. I have tried both parenting the clusters to the bone that the head is rotating from and unparenting the clusters but they still distort. It is as though the pivots by which the clusters are rotating are not in acting in their own local rotational axis...

What am I doing wrong I cannot figure it out. :confused:

eeek.. sounds weird. do you have the upper and lower lid clusters grouped into theyre own IE L_upper_lid, L_lower_lid etc or are they all separate clusters?
if the files not too huge either post it here or email it and I'll take a peek if its urgent.

One possible solution is to parent the clusters to an empty group and then parent the group to the bone. Clusters are pretty finicky when it comes to their positions in hierarchies.

I'm not surprised at all. The AM community is very arrogant and fascist about their software. They don't take any form of criticism well at all. That's one reason why I stopped using AM. That, and it crashed too much. :)

First thanks for the tips guys! I will try what you said Dannyngan and Kal I'm sending you the model for your experienced eye to peruse and tell me what is wrong with the sucker.

I have attached a final render of the scene for fun and anyone who is interested. I have noticed that the shader I have used for the skin is not moving with knobby's skin, I don't think I have parented the 3dTexture correctly. Thing is it looks quite good like that, sort of moody...

Knobby File
 

Kal

I thought I could send an attachment on a private e-mail but cannot seem to work it out. Please have a look at the attached file if it is not too big and not too much trouble. Indeed by posting it here anyone can look at it and download it!

Have fun everyone! :cool:

Re: Knobby File
 

yes sorry gaz, I have disabled this feature :)

...and for those of you who cannot be *rsed to download the movie (I understand) here is a silly render...

Fun rig! Controls work pretty well.

I examined the setup for the eyelids, and as it is right now, you can't simply re-parent the eyelid control groups to the neck bone. You would probably have to redo the SDK's in order to make them work.

I'm too tired right now to really troubleshoot it properly. I'll take a look at it this weekend and see what I can figure out.

Cool stuff - at work now so i cant actually look at it but will take a peek later on (though sounds like danny has it pretty much sussed anyhoo :D ). regardless tis always fun looking at other peoples rigs