Rig overview

Sarah rig structure:

Aldon Rig Structure

Rig explanation Sarah Without a Soul

Without a soul - Rigging - Stage Two

Here is an overview of a rigging process of the female character for Without A Soul. This rig is definitely more advanced comparing to Aldon's rig. It has some extra stuff like IK/FK switch for the arms, automatic clavicle, forearm and arm rotation option more friendly controls and more. I have touched on a bit of MEL which in the end wasn't so bad and I think with a bit more time and coffee I could learn it. I have definitely enjoyed rigging. I find that observational skills are so needed and I got to work with another aspect of human figure and motion. I'm happy as well that I this project happened to be before I took on modelling. It help me understand how important is a good model and correct topology. I hope my modelling will benefit from this project.

Blend shapes

This is the first time that I came close to bled shapes. I must  admit I had lots of fun doing this, mainly because of drawing, observation and modelling process. 


Great inspiration and resource for me, was the book: Facial Expression. A visual reference for Artists. by Mark Simon.

 Here is the research:

And the outcome:

Since the mood of the film 'Without a Soul' moves across two emotions - happiness and sadness  - facial expression are pretty limited. 

Rig problems

After making first draft of Aldon's rig I have discovered that the outcome of it is quite problematic. Weights and skin deformations seemed to be not working no matter what I did. After looking closely at it and getting some feedback, I have decided to readjust geometry and change the joint position. Unfortunately I've detached  skin in the wrong way so it meant for me redoing weights, which as you can imagine affected schedule quite badly.

You can see problems arasing in the previous post about rigging. Just to repeat how those points used to look like.

The most problematic were shoulders, lower abdomen and groin area, where I needed to add some extra edge loops. And this is how it looks now. Still its not the best option but there is no time to change things at this stage. In some extend adding extra edge loops helped.

Extra edge loops went into wrist are as well.


Additional rig issues:

1.  Twisting at the shoulders and wrists as soon as  the IK handle is moved. To fix this I have moved Elbows controls futher back to allow movement for the arm.

2. Twist in the knee, where the Pole Vectors are causing flipping.  to solve this problem I've parented the control for each knee to its respective foot control.

3. Joint position :

4. Smoothing weights

Additionally the buttons on the shirt were deforming quite badly. To prevent this I have used parent to surface script that you can find in here: http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/duncan/parent_to_surface_script
 

Another issue I've encountered was with blend shapes. Since all the face is constructed with separate meshes I took some time on figuring how to do face expressions. Answer was simple - set driven keys!

The report on how I get on with blend shapes you can find in next post

Aldon - Rig Explanation