Introduction:
In this week’s blog, I’ll be speaking about what we went through during this week’s lecture with Alan, where we mainly spoke about what was required from us for the second project of this unit, and what’s to be expected in the next upcoming 10 weeks. I’ll then be talking about my process in this week’s workshop, where we had to manually rig a character model from scratch, highlighting the tools I used to complete it.
This Week’s Lecture:
In this week’s lecture, we first went through the briefing of the second project of this unit, where we have to research and develop a ‘(small) pilot project’. Our lecturer wants us to use this opportunity to explore, test, and refine a personal creative/technical methodology (pipeline) as a ‘proof of concept’, treating it as a small test for what we may do for our FMP. He exaggerated that we should dig deeper into specifics or implications of an idea, and avoid genericism. To help us understand more, he demonstrated an example of how he wants us to be specific.
Our lecturer also wants us to develop our skills during this project, ideally a skill we currently lack in already, or maybe a new software. To keep things reasonable so we have a chance to succeed, he advised us to do what we know now plus 20% of something new. In regards to this, I really want to improve on rigging and modeling, meaning I may include one or both of these in this project. Our lecturer also gave us the opportunity to team up with someone else for this project, which is something I may consider, depending on if I find a suitable colleague to work alongside with.
Afterward, our lecturer went through what we needed to submit for this assignment. Besides the 3D animation itself, we will need to record a short audio & visual presentation lasting no more than 10 minutes explaining our premise (project 2) work. Furthermore, we also need to submit a production diary (our blogs), detailing our progress throughout the next 10 weeks, one blog post per week. Lastly, we went over what we would be learning over the next 10 weeks. We will be focusing on a specific skill for the majority of the weeks; however, we will have two ‘work in progress check-ins’ on weeks 6 & 9 so our lecturer knows what stage we’re at halfway through the term, and one week just before our deadline.
Once our lecture was finished, we moved on to the class activity whereby we manually created a basic rig for a character model. We began by positing locators firstly, representing where we were going to position the joints. Using the locators as reference points, we then replaced those locators with joints to create a complete skeleton rig. During this workshop, we were also taught to correctly name our objects as it will be important for us when we step into the animation industry. Unfortunately, I got lost halfway during the workshop, meaning I wasn’t able to complete the task. Therefore, I’ll be completing it this week, using the recordings.
This Week’s Task:
For this week’s task, our lecturer has asked us to complete the workshop we were doing in our lesson if we were unable to complete it in class. He also asked us to think about what we would like to do for this unit’s project as he’ll be going around next week’s class, asking us about the ideas we have.
So I began the workshop again, using the recordings. This worked out better for me as I was able to stop and start the recording at any time, giving me the chance to fully understand what I’m actually doing, rather than just copying my lecturer’s every step. So I opened up my character model.
As I opened up my character model, I realised that the head and eyes didn’t have their texture applied to them. This wasn’t important at this stage; therefore, I continued with the workshop without attempting to fix this issue.
So my first primary task was to find joint positions within the model. I did this by creating locator markers and positioning them around the main parts of the body.
To help me know which locator marker represented a certain area of the body, I created multiple layers, each one for a specific body part, and assigned a different colour to each of them. This made things visually easier for me.
When positioning locators within the body, I made sure each locator was positioned more or less in the middle. In certain areas, I did this by inserting clusters, where I selected the two vertexes on each side to create a cluster at the midpoint. The clusters were a reference marker as to where I would position the locator.
As you can visualise in the screenshot above, there are four cluster markers positioned within the middle of the index finger, ready to be replaced with locators and then joints. When inserting a joint, I kept them clean and straight using grid-snapping and joint orientation. This allowed me to position them in the exact spot where the locators were positioned.
So once I replaced all locators with joints, I parented the limbs together to form half a skeleton. All I needed to do now is mirror the skeleton to form a completed skeleton. However, before I mirror the joints, I first had to rename those joints.
My lecturer mentioned in class that it’s important that we start assigning a naming structure to our objects, even though It has no actual effect on our work at the moment. He said it’s good to start practicing now and embedding it into our workflow because it’ll be needed once we start working within the industry. This is because we would be working within a team, meaning we would be sending each other multiple files, whereby we would all need to share the same naming structure. As you can see in the screenshot below, it’s still fairly easy to understand the names. For instance, “l_knee_jnt” means “left knee joint”.
After naming each joint, I was now ready to mirror the joints. In the mirror joint settings, I was able to name the mirrored joints whilst mirroring the actual joints themselves. As all my original joints began with “l_”, which means “left”, I was able to replace “l_” with “r_”, meaning all the mirrored joints will have the same name, but beginning with “r_” instead.
So to establish;
All joints on the right side of the body would start with “r_”.
All joints on the left side of the body would start with “l_”.
All joints in the centre of the body would start with “c_”.
Here in the screenshot above, is the completed skeleton rig, consisting of all joints. This week’s workshop was now completed, meaning I’m now ready to proceed with next week’s workshop.