Sunday 29 January 2017

Red Rig - Almost there!!!

My presence on the blog has been scarce... and for good reason. Rigging Red has been a bit of a nightmare. There have been times when I think I had something good to post, only for things to go a bit awry at the last minute. It always became a decision between posting something at the expense of causing more delays in finishing Red.


However, this time I made a promise that I'd post something. First up, here's an updated turnaround with Red striking a pose!





Next we have a short video which hopefully illustrates the complexities of the rigging process. Everything in Maya is represented as collection of interconnected nodes. The rig is made up of hundreds, maybe even thousands of nodes (I haven't counted). However if we were to draw the complete node graph, this is what it would look like:


( and turn the volume up for full effect! )






Lastly we have a video which demonstrates some of the key features of the rig. This is (I think) the second time I've recorded myself talking so you'll have to forgive me for any trip ups.

As the title of this post suggests, it's not the final version of the rig, but it is the first working version.





So there we have it. There are still some things which need finishing off such as:
- tweaking the control shapes
- colour coding the controls
- visibility of the controls
- tidying up the scene file and packaging it up etc


Of course, I can't forget that I'm only half way there! I still need to finish Yellow.
Yellow shouldn't take anywhere near as long as Red because I've already done the research. I've developed everything from scratch and tested everything on Red. What could possibly go wrong now?

Ethan Shilling

3 comments:

  1. also... so nice to hear you discussing your work on this, Ethan - informative and funny - maybe the beginning of something you should do more of?

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  2. I would certainly like to do more videos like this, but I have found them very difficult to do. I haven't yet found the method that works well for me. I don't like the idea of scripting it fully, word for word, because it wont sound natural. I much prefer doing the talking and the video simultaneously - if only I could figure out how to stream information coherently. I think I did ok in that video, but there were several things I completely forgot to talk about, despite have notes that I could refer to.

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